Bruce Perens said something in Revolution OS that I had not thought of before. It has to do with the GPL versus the BSD license. He talks about how that the GPL is a partnership license, whereas the BSD license is not a partnership license. He goes on to say the BSD license (and the MIT license by extension) were created at universities through the funding of U.S. government grant programs and industry consortia.
Huh. I think that is probably a pretty accurate observation, and it’s a bit unsettling.