How Open Source Licenses Affect Your Business and Your Developers

For most of the 2000s, copyleft licenses were the most popular choice for new open source projects. In the last few years, developers and companies seem to be trending away from the GPL in favor of permissive licenses for open source projects. What's behind that, does it impact your business and what licenses should you choose for new projects? Let's take a look.

For companies that merely consume open source software, the trend is fairly neutral. Lots of interesting software continues to be developed as open source and is available to your business.

Philosophically, I prefer the copyleft licenses. But, practically, I can see the rationale for businesses standardizing on permissive licenses.