Fair point. I was borrowing, to a certain extent, from the original piece which was primarily discussing software vendors. But the additional context you provide can’t hurt.

Vis a vis your comment that it’s for “software which they themselves do not write,” I’d say that’s not generally the case. Many vendors we work with are more comfortable – for better or for worse – contributing and author code under non-GPL style licenses.

“I honestly can’t see a butcher, baker or candlestick making corporation caring that they can’t take the software code they use proprietary and then sell it.”

I’m continually surprised at how enterprise buyers – meaning non-software vendors – have antiquated and frankly incorrect views of the GPL, and are thereby unreasonably frightened of the license. One of our clients, as an example, mentioned to clients they were considering switching to a GPL license for a variety of reasons. These clients – large financial houses mostly – threatened to rip out the software in retaliation, in spite of the fact that they have large swaths of their infrastructure already on GPL’d software in Linux.

Foolish? Absolutely. But it happens.

“Indeed to further reinforce the point made earlier, if “businesses” are such fans of the Apache licence etc. then why do they so often release their own software as proprietary code.”

Because they can. They enjoy the opportunity to take code, add their own assets and release a new, differentiated product under a proprietary license.

This may be affected by the circles in which you move and therefore how you conceive of what is a “business”, but it would be more correct perhaps to say “businesses *which primarily profit from selling software* prefer Apache etc. *for software which they themselves do not write*”.

I honestly can’t see a butcher, baker or candlestick making corporation caring that they can’t take the software code they use proprietary and then sell it.

Nor can I see a software company (proprietary or not) being happy about another software company taking their Apache released code proprietary and making it incompatible. (Indeed to further reinforce the point made earlier, if “businesses” are such fans of the Apache licence etc. then why do they so often release their own software as proprietary code.)

I’ve obviously not covered the many in’s and out’s here, it’s a complex topic, on that is worthy of more than the standard “businesses hate the GPL” line which while popular, I believe is both uninteresting and untrue.