"why should I invest my own free time in a project that could be subverted from bringing freedom to its users?"
More important, why should I invest company resources on software that could be used to compete against me by a better funded competitor?
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Why should you invest company resource on FOSS that could be used against you? According to Joel, because the project complements your commercial product: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html
While the strategy to commoditize your product's complements is clever, doing so can be dangerous if you use a license that allows your competitors to take your work and run against you. When doing so, one should be careful to use licenses that can't be turned against _you_.
All MIT/BSD licenses can. All *GPLs, MPLs can't. The choice is clear.
From the projects he mentioned:
IBM (Linux): GPL Netscape/Mozilla (Mozilla/Gecko): MPL Transmeta (Linux): GPL Sun/HP (Gnome): GPL
There is a pattern to be seen: GPL licenses create vigorous diverse communities around them more easily than BSD-styled licenses.