I was studying this material about major open source licenses used nowadays and I was a bit surprised with the decline of GPL, it was around 50% in 2012 and it is down to 45%. An article at javaworldclaims this fall is due the fact developers don’t care anymore about the license their software are released.In fact, building code under the name of the open source movement seems to be definitive e recently decisions by Microsoft (Linq, Roslyn among others) seems that is really the case.
This leads to a major big corps are facing: if code is being freely releases what’s my incentive to invest in good developers? what’s my incentive to stimulate innovation?
Startups and smallers companies (which soon enough become big) already understood this is a fallacy. Software is commodity in the sense it’s an asset easy to get. But quality of generated code is where the value is created: that’s the point fortune200 have to tackle: how to use software commoditization to make something truly big?
This is what turned those startups and small companies real competitors.