> IBM makes tons of money off of Linux, for example.
Personally I would rather contribute to a GPL licensed project, because if big companies try to profit of it, they will also have to release their changes. Those could improve the project, and now the community does no longer have to do themselves -> Community devs get payed back in development time that they would have to spend themselves.
With permissively licensed projects (or commercially dual-licensed), where big companies are allowed to just take and improve it internally without giving anything back to the community, a community dev would pretty much be an unpaid developer for those companies.
Strictly speaking, they only have to release their changes to people they distribute their product to. It's convenient to keep it entirely open, but not a requirement.
I agree that folks should contribute code to places they feel comfortable in any case. As I mentioned in GP, if you separate out pay, there are other reasons to work on OSS, and these motivations can coexist.
Personally I would rather contribute to a GPL licensed project, because if big companies try to profit of it, they will also have to release their changes. Those could improve the project, and now the community does no longer have to do themselves -> Community devs get payed back in development time that they would have to spend themselves.
With permissively licensed projects (or commercially dual-licensed), where big companies are allowed to just take and improve it internally without giving anything back to the community, a community dev would pretty much be an unpaid developer for those companies.