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one can make an argument that it depends on who is the copyright holder. if it is an individual or a non-profit entity, then the GPL is beneficial. but if it is a corporation, then a BSD license is preferable for others because it allows competitors to that corporation to compete on equal terms.

so to turn the argument around BSD unix would not exist in its current form if the initial corporate developers had not released it under a BSD compatible license.

so it's not just about volunteer BSD developers subsidizing corporations. but there is a give and take in the BSD world too.

compare that to mariadb which contains most of the code that is owned and controlled by oracle now and which prevents mariadb to sell to clients that demand a custom license agreement.

now for a GPL fan, this is irrelevant because they shouldn't be selling such licenses anyways, but fact is that the owner of a GPL product is the only one who can sell such licenses, whereas anyone who uses a BSD product can sell such licenses.

in this sense, BSD code ownership can not be sold because actual ownership of the code is pretty much irrelevant, whereas GPL code ownership can be sold because the owner always has an advantage.




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