Is GPLed code protected from market forces?
It is not the case that a GPled project cannot be “taken over” by a commercial company. For instance, Red Hat, the leading US Linux distributor, purchased an engineering company (Cygnus) that had taken over development of the FSF compiler tools, such as the gcc compiler. Cygnus was able to do this because Cygnus had developed a business model in which they sold support for GNU software, enabling them to employ some 50 engineers and drive the direction of the programs by contributing the preponderance of modifications. The president of Cygnus wrote: “Unlike proprietary software, in which companies fight in a two-sided win/lose contest, with Open Source it’s more like fighting on a Moebius strip and everything flows to the side of the primary maintainer.” [Tie99] A recognized open source licensing expert describes this as follows: “Projects using licenses like the GPL, … live under constant threat of having someone take over the project by producing a better version of the code and
