Corporate-Friendly Open Source Licenses

Question

What open source licenses are more corporate-friendly, i.e., they can be used in commercial products without the need to open source the commercial product?

Answer 1

The two most commonly used licenses that allow what you want are the BSD License and MIT License. (see also the full list of licenses considered Open Source by the OSI).

Answer 2

The GNU Lesser General Public Licence is also corporate-friendly and quite often used in libraries. It allows for usage of a certain library but modifications to it should be made public.

Answer 3

As a possible alternative to the BSD license you can also use the Ms-PL license (Microsoft public license). Pretty much the same but (arguably) better worded. Additionally, It's got “Microsoft” in its name, which screams “corprate-friendly” like nothing else does. ;-)

Answer 4

By "corporate" I tend to think of internal development, programs distributed only to people that are employed by the same company. In that sense, pretty much all free software licences are "corporate-friendly."

However, in terms of distributing closed-source software that contains free software the only big one (off the top of my head) that is excluded is the GPL. You could embed LGPL, BSD, MIT, Artistic licenced code. The "price" might be having to give credit, but that would be way cheaper than actually writing and debugging the software.

Things can get hazy when you consider licences that try to protect trademarks (Mozilla) or the compatibility of a broader range of software (Sun). Your constraints are not always only related to the distribution of the code.

In summary, if you're unsure you should consult a lawyer.

Answer 5

Basically, only the GPL requires that the whole product is GPL, and LGPL implies that the parts specific to that library be open sourced. But, for both, the problem arises only when you distribute the application.

For all the other open source licenses, the only common requirement is the publicity (ie. show at some point to the user what open source component / library is used).

After that you have the "no competing commercial product" licenses...

All in all, the most acknowledged business friendly license are IMHO the Apache License, the Artistic License and the Mozilla Public license.

Furthermore, even if Creative Commons is not widely used for software development, some options are business friendly.

Edit: forgot BSD (which is more a license-template than a license) and MIT mentionned by Daniel. It seems to me that their usages are fading away, but there is some license tropism to take in account according to the development language / open source sub-community.

Answer 6

Ideally I looked for components licensed under the Apache Software License. After that LGPL, BSD and Artistic License are my next preferences.

Answer 7

I recommend the Apache License (specifically, version 2). It is not a “copy left” license and it addresses several matters that are important to established companies and their lawyers.

“Copy left” is the philosophy of the free software foundation requiring anything incorporating the licensed opens source code to also be licensed as open source. That philosophy is regarded as poison by established companies that want to keep their products proprietary.

Aside from not having “copy left” provisions, the Apache license specifically addresses the grant of rights from project contributors and it expressly addresses the fact that modern companies are typically made up for more than one legal entity (for example, a parent company and its subsidiaries). Most open source licenses don’t address these points.

Whatever license you choose, if you want your code to be “corporate friendly,” in the sense that you want it to be incorporated into commercial, non-open source products, it is essential that you avoid GPL and other “copy left” type licenses. While it would be best to consult with your own lawyer before investing time or money in a project for which this is an important factor, a quick shorthand for licenses that are and are not “copy left” can be found on the Free Software Foundation’s website. They identify which licenses they don’t find meet their standards as “copy left.” The ones FSF rejects are most likely the ones that will be corporate friendly in this sense.

(Although the question didn’t ask this, it is worth mentioning that, with very few exceptions, even GPL and other “copy left” type licenses are perfectly corporate friendly if they are only used internally by the commercial entities and not incorporated into their products.)

Answer 8

I believe that 6 of the 9 licenses on the OSI's list of "Licenses that are popular and widely used or with strong communities" meet your criterion: Apache, BSD, MIT, Mozilla, CPL, and Eclipse. The Mozilla license and CPL (the Common Public License) have language concerning patents that might make them more attractive to corporations.

See here for more information.

Answer 9

MIT, Apache and BSD tend to be the most corporate friendly. The least corporate friendly that I have ran across are usually Q Public, GPL and Mozilla...