It's bizarre. They'd rather have their code locked up into someone else's codebase than having it always free in someone else's codebase.
Look at OpenOffice compared to LibreOffice, for an example of this. If there wasn't a GPL version the community would have rallied around the Apache version.
Then LibreOffice was started to sort this all out. A real fork, a new name, it folded in Go-OO and other community improvements and committed to proper governance, addressing technical debt etc.
A year or so later, Oracle 'gifted' the stunted and now somewhat left behind OO.o to the Apache project. A few corporates got behind it, but it had no community traction, and any small improvements that did get rolled in were very quickly adopted by LO, where flow the other way was almost non-existant.
This is not really a story of licensing as much as it is community mismanagement by Sun, and active hostility from Oracle.
OpenOffice not working at all is not due to the license, at all. OpenOffice didn't work for a long time. Distributions have always added a huge patch to make it work nicely for them. There's been calls for ages to change things and not much was done with it.
Eventually they started LibreOffice and focussed on making it easy to contribute.
In above, nothing is about the license!!
I don't know if that's the reason why it didn't pick up, but generally I think of code that goes to the Apache Foundation as going there to die. The foundation seems to receive abandoned code that nobody wants to maintain.
Potential contributors often never hear about the Open Source projects used behind their television, phone, routers, editors, games...
Also, I thought that was resolved by putting the license back in the file, causing it to be licensed under the intersection of BSD and GPL.
