Comment by ndsipa_pomu

That seems to be a limited view of open source software and is ignoring communities that work together on useful code and a lot of successful projects.

One of the advantages of using open source code is that updates aren't purely done for commercial reasons and popular projects will tend to get a lot more people working on them than a similar proprietary piece of code. There's a lot to be said for enthusiasts working to make something better because they want to, rather than a paid developer just adding in features that a sales team think will look good in publicity materials and not being permitted to spend time fixing long standing issues with the code base.

It's an implied social contract between the developers and the users - the users will often recommend the software to others and there's an expectation that a popular, active project (i.e. not just some code that someone's published and then left alone) will continue to be active.

Switching licenses is only really feasible where all the code is owned by an individual (person or business) - certainly switching Linux to a different a license would be incredibly difficult.

It's all about getting people to work together rather than in competition.