To many developers, the main reason they contribute to open source software is for the benefit of leveraging each others work. If one is the sole author due to lack of contributions, from that perspective there is no value to the developer in providing it as open source. The problem is compounded if they look around and see companies profiting off of their work and neither contributing fixes/improvements back nor funding the developer(s) who do.
So how is it harmed? By exactly the situation playing out with FUSE: the person who has been maintaining it has been seeing no benefit financial or otherwise and decides to take his ball (the source code) home as he has every right to do. I suspect if he doesn't see some corporate sponsorship soon he may very well decide to stop releasing future updates entirely.
> To many developers, the main reason they contribute to open source software is for the benefit of leveraging each others work.
Then these developers need to understand copyright and licensing, and choose a license that enforces that motive. If you release under BSD, you're not encouraging companies with a profit motive to contribute back.
So how is it harmed? By exactly the situation playing out with FUSE: the person who has been maintaining it has been seeing no benefit financial or otherwise and decides to take his ball (the source code) home as he has every right to do. I suspect if he doesn't see some corporate sponsorship soon he may very well decide to stop releasing future updates entirely.