I just don't understand people who want to write software for free under a BSD style license without getting any payment and let other companies make money with it and without the obligation to give modifications back...
I'm one of those people. The reason for me writing software is that I love doing it. I develop weird and wonderful pieces of code, some of it is even useful.
I'd love it if more people find it useful and makes their lives easier in some way. To me, it doesn't matter if they use it at home for their own pet projects, or if they include it in the latest wiz-bang 2000 commercial product. I still had fun when I wrote it.
So, the only way to allow people to use it whenever, wherever is to use a non-copyleft license (such as BSD, MIT, etc), as a lot of companies are either scared of even accidentally violating the GPL, or are unwilling to set up the infrastructure/routines to comply with the copyleft. (Yes, I know it's not a big deal, but they think differently)
I know for a fact that my BSD-licensed code have shipped in 10s of millions of devices due to just one company using it. There might be more that I don't know of, but that's okay.
It's not really something fancy, but it does what it needs really well, and it has been very well tested. If I hadn't BSD-licensed that code, the company probably would have rolled their own solution to it.
So, I see it as two options.
1. I use a license that's compatible with proprietary software, and save someone a couple of weeks work
or
2. I use a copyleft license, and nobody uses it, and I "waste" two weeks of some engineers time, writing something I have already written, but probably not as well tested.
I'm not trying to sway anyone towards a non-copyleft license here. I'm just saying why _I'm_ doing things a certain way.
To me, software only has value when its being used. With a non-copyleft license, more people can use it.
As for money? None of my project will solve world hunger, create peace on earth or do anything people would (or should) pay money for. I make money for food and shelter by developing proprietary products. My payback for giving away my software is that I get to use other peoples software that they give away.