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"Business-Friendly" licensing"Business-Friendly" licensingPosted Jan 16, 2007 10:55 UTC (Tue) by samb (guest, #32949)In reply to: "Business-Friendly" licensing by ldo 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. 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.
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"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.
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