A good example of this pull towards cheaper maintainance is Microsoft eventually replacing its proprietary web engine with Chromium.

Although, as I've noted in the other comment, that wouldn't happen if Chromium was permissively licensed. It happened because its partially LGPL/MPL, and thus you can't create a proprietary fork (but can still use it in a proprietary browser like the new MS Edge). It seems like somethimes LGPL/MPL have the best survival characteristics