Can you provide examples of software that were released by their original author using BSD/Mit style licence and got steamrolled by a third party who took their code and mangled it?
At least to my knowledge the opposite seems to be more common. Experts release a library under a very permissive licence, and everybody wins. One such example is libPNG.
I got an example, you are likely using it right now.
KHTML (LGPL, not GPL) taken by Apple to make WebKit (LGPL), later "rewritten" and licensed BSD for 2.0.
Apple did also the dirty trick of giving a single huge patch against the previous release of KHTML making it almost impossible to integrate back to the main codebase. Even LGPL can be abused. Lesson learned the hard way by the community.
And you now have everyone parroting how great WebKit is, nobody remembers the original team at KDE. It was brutal.
Microsoft used their own implementation of Kerberos. From the Kerberos Wikipedia entry:
> While Microsoft uses the Kerberos protocol, it does not use the MIT software.
The license of the original implementation is thus irrelevant. Pretty much the only thing that would have prevented MS would have been if there were patents on Kerberos.
Did MS use kerberos implementation or the protocol, wiki page isn't very clear on it. If it is 2nd then it would be an entirely different issue, which even GPL/copyleft wouldn't have helped (though oracle java lawsuit may do so).
How would the Oracle lawsuit change anything? Protocols are almost explicitly the things that are not protected by copyright. The problem is, people here are confusing interfaces in human-readable code (copyright-eligible) with interfaces for binary interoperability between systems (not eligible).
no dude, not only did they take the code and extend the protocol[1], while attempting to relicense it[2], but then they tried to sue /. to remove posts of people that talked about it[3].
Yes, they used the code itself (which was legal due to the 3-clause license), but didn't credit until publicly shamed. There was a huge stink back in the day because of it.
At least to my knowledge the opposite seems to be more common. Experts release a library under a very permissive licence, and everybody wins. One such example is libPNG.
http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/src/libpng-LICENSE.txt