Could Open Source Software Be Put Into The Public Domain Instead?

“The key point is that the code without the community that creates it is pretty much dead. A company may gain a short-term advantage in taking public domain code and enclosing it, but by refusing to give back its changes, it loses any chance of collaborating with the coders who are writing the future versions. It will have no influence, and no way of raising issues of particular concern that help it with its products. Instead, it will have to keep up the development of its own version of the code single-handed. That’s likely to be costly at best, and may even be impossible except for the very largest companies (Apple is an example of one that has succeeded, basing its Mac OS X operating system on the free BSD version of Unix.)”