Back when I was covering open source every day for ZDNet, the issue of control was just in the process of switching from patent to copyright.
Oracle was the villain here. After buying Sun Microsystems, holder of important open source projects like Solaris, OpenOffice and Java, Oracle used its control of copyright for those projects to try and monetize them.
Programmers who had, in good faith, contributed their work to a shared code base, suddenly found a new owner trying to make money off their work. They were pissed.
But Oracle had found a loophole in the open source ethos. Copyright could control code. So the license a project had, and the position of that license on what I termed the Open Source Incline, didn't really matter. Copyright mattered. And without some control over copyright by an outside party, a project's new owner was free to do whatever they wanted.
Apache had “fixed” this long before by making it a policy that code contributors retained their copyrights. But even this solution isn't foolproof. It can kill a project if the lead developer decides to take the project in a direction a minority don't like – they just pull their copyrights and that's it. Dead end for the customer.
Besides, Apache supports a BSD-like license, the Apache license. Beloved of corporate America because it's “permissive,” it basically permits any member of the project from withholding their own code contributions and productizing them. You need X to make Y work, pay – even if you were a code contributor to X.
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