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"Business-Friendly" licensing"Business-Friendly" licensingPosted Jan 16, 2007 9:26 UTC (Tue) by ldo (subscriber, #40946)Parent article: BSD - The Dark Horse of Open Source, by Brendan Scott, OS Law (Groklaw)
There is a common description of non-copyleft licences as being "business-friendly", with the implication that copyleft licences like the GPL are not. Personally, I don't understand this. If I were a for-profit business contributing open-source code to the community, and one of my comptetitors took some code I'd contributed and built it into a closed-source product that they then used to take customers away from me, I'd feel ripped off. Whereas a copyleft licence forces them to release the source of anything they redistribute. Thus, to me, copyleft ensures a "level playing field" where all can compete. Which is something that businesses are supposed to be fond of.
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"Business-Friendly" licensing Posted Jan 16, 2007 10:55 UTC (Tue) by samb (subscriber, #32949) [Link] There is a common description of non-copyleft licences as being "business-friendly", with the implication that copyleft licences like the GPL are not. The assumption being that the business in question is in the business of selling software. That's rarely the case. Back in the late 90s when OSS was gaining mainstream recognition with Linux as it's poster child, the one thing the FreeBSD crowd believed was inevitably going to make their system the open source OS of choice was the BSD license.
"Business-Friendly" licensing Posted Jan 19, 2007 22:21 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] There is a common description of non-copyleft licences as being "business-friendly", with the implication that copyleft licences like the GPL are not.I think the discrepancy is just that the implication when someone says BSD is business friendly and copyleft is not is that we mean friendly to licensees (or potential licensees). Even if the licensee business is a software distributor, he's welcome under BSD to redistribute under copyleft, so the licensee is at least as well off as under copyleft. But it's a good distinction to make. Taking the larger view, the use of copyleft might very well be more friendly to business than the use of BSD.
"Business-Friendly" licensing Posted Jan 29, 2007 12:51 UTC (Mon) by Tr0n (guest, #42662) [Link] .. Tell me, how can you sell a product which you can get for free?
The only thing you can sell, is support or training, which again - you can mostly get through google/experience.
"Business-Friendly" licensing Posted Jan 29, 2007 20:14 UTC (Mon) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] Ask that of the $8 billion U.S. bottled water industry. Or of Red Hat, Apple or Microsoft. There are plenty of examples.
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