That's why only gpl like licences is viable for opensource, because look at freebsd, Apple uses it, Sony uses it, and many others, but did they contributed back as much as Google and others did to Linux? Nah
I love that the gpl license is taking over more and more. I have a couple projects and I proudly use the gpl license. You want to use it? As long as you're at least as open as I am go for it! You want to close source your code? You're going to talk to me about licensing my code then.
In my experience it's because companies desire a year end return greater than the last. To do so means every investment of time to them needs to be of monetary gain, or else they show gains by cutting the employees that would work on that project and the bottom line goes up. Aka more investors and stock increases (overlap occurs there)
I don't think they do, I think they are inquiring into how we can get them to support production of these products without emphasizing on their own profits.
Okay, I would love that but let me see if I can play devils advocate and get productive responses that work in the capitalistic world we are stuck in.
Why would a company pay a team millions of dollars annually to give it away for free. That destines their entire company for failure in their mind. They get no kick backs other than a thank you note for doing so... Which means nothing to their bottom line but down.
take a look at libreoffice, proxmox, pfsense, flexiwan, canonical, redhat if you want an example of this business model actually working, at different stages of success.
What if i have an idea and part of that idea is that it's easy to implement; once the idea is out in the world, it's easy to build alternate clients for it. How do i keep megacorps from using their ressources to take the whole thing over à la Google Chrome? Should i patent the idea?