Virality might suit the ego, but it doesn't make for a healthy project when its primary users are parasitic.
Virality might suit the ego, but it doesn't make for a healthy project when its primary users are parasitic.
Software is not a scarce good. Let companies use free software without contributing back as much as they wish; it doesn't affect others in the least. There is no bleeding of the commons here, because even if companies take as much as they can without giving back, it doesn't reduce the resources available for others.
When that development gets silo'ed away in proprietary systems, that is potential development lost upstream. If that happens enough, upstream becomes starved and anemic, and with forks only living on in silos.
Apple, for example, has made trillions of dollars off of FreeBSD. To this day, FreeBSD still does not have a modern WiFi or Bluetooth stack.
Meanwhile, AMD, Intel, Microsoft, and even Apple, etc have full-time engineering roles and teams dedicated to upstreaming their improvements to Linux. And there are paid engineers at these companies that ensure WiFi and Bluetooth work on Linux.