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Nope, that's backwards. Companies contribute upstream when it's permissive (cheaper to do this, no one wants to maintain a fork if they don't have to) but they redo the work internally to make a proprietary competitor when it's not permissive.
In one scenario money flows back to OSS (via contributions upstream), in the other scenario the money is put into proprietary duplicated effort.
This happens again and again, a project grows by leveraging permissive OSS, then gets upset that people are profiting from permissive code (as they should!), relicenses, and the community (which includes companies!) abandons them, then they come crawling back years later. Most recently, Redis. And you can see what will happen, the original BSD valkey fork will continue to thrive while the new AGPL license will stagnate because it's too toxic. 1 reply
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