alt Hacker NewsIt's true that we don't have any definitive data on this.
But I buy the article's argument that upstreaming a patch once is simply cheaper than maintaining your own proprietary fork forever. It externalizes the efforts of maintaining it in the future. This means that public, community-maintained, permissively-licenced projects are a good deal for companies, and should win from the economic / game theory POV
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If this is correct then the lgpl would be ideal?
Also, it depends how much value-add they see their modifications having. For small tweaks and bug fixes they'll contribute it. If they invest a lot of money into something, they'll be loath to hand that value over to their competitors. There is some tipping point where the competitive value (or more realistically the jealous urge not to share) of their efforts exceeds the utility of easy tracking with upstream changes.
I feel like a massive counterexample here is embedded. Hardware companies tend to laugh at maintenance (it's expensive and extends the life of their products, so you don't have to give them money as often). If Linux was not GPL, many embedded platforms like routers or smartphones would not have kernel code available.