Exactly. There's a reason why more restrictive licenses are more conducive to dual licensing models than less restrictive ones.
A non-copyleft license effectively means that Microsoft, should they try EEE, has to compete not only with free as in beer and free as in freedom, they also have to compete with all the closed source competition they are subsidizing in this effort.
If you believe that more competition is good, the less restrictions on the code from a big vendor, the better.
Copyleft licenses are more conductive to dual licensing because they give you no other choice if you want to sell a closed source premium version. That's the only reason. And for that to work you have to get copyright assignment.
I think your view is pretty naive. They develop the platform and own the IDE that's synonymous with it. They can keep any other compiler off the IDE if they want that, you would be competing with them at their house, which is doomed to fail.
With copyleft without assignment at least any later version would effectively remain free for all, whether Microsoft wants it or not. You don't have to believe and hope, it's just the way it is.
You can think what you will about my opinion but it is based on a decade-long career around both BSD-licensed and GPL-licensed projects.
> Copyleft licenses are more conductive to dual licensing because they give you no other choice if you want to sell a closed source premium version.
And the licensor can always decline to sell the license to a competitor though this might be problematic for a big company. The point is that the GPL gives a company control over proprietary spinoffs, while the BSD license does not.
> They can keep any other compiler off the IDE if they want that, you would be competing with them at their house, which is doomed to fail.
Frankly their choice of licensing makes no difference in what sorts of products they can ship.
> With copyleft without assignment at least any later version would effectively remain free for all, whether Microsoft wants it or not.
But the point is that you end up with less competition under a copyleft license because fewer forms of competition are in line with the license. If your fear is against Microsoft as competitor, giving up more rights is better than giving up fewer.
You say you think my view is naive, so I have to ask: how does one both release code under the Apache2 license, a license which allows anyone to change the license and add restrictions when distributing it provided that the license restrictions in that license are met, and adopt an embrace-extend-extinguish strategy. The first two might work ok because one could sell additional proprietary features just like anyone else, but the final one doesn't work because you are competing against yourself if you do that.
A non-copyleft license effectively means that Microsoft, should they try EEE, has to compete not only with free as in beer and free as in freedom, they also have to compete with all the closed source competition they are subsidizing in this effort.
If you believe that more competition is good, the less restrictions on the code from a big vendor, the better.