High level software licenses for businesses

Software Licensing is a complicated topic, so for the purpose of this writing we will focus on what licenses are safe for business use in proprietary software. Because this topic can be so complicated to understand all the nuances involved, many times engineers can forget to check what license a dependency or package they want to pull in is using.

Open Source Software licenses can be separated into two broad categories: permissive licenses and copyleft licenses.

Permissive Licenses

Permissive licenses is a "free-software license" which carries only minimal restrictions on how the software can be used, modified, and redistributed. Permissive licenses also allows proprietary derived works and does not require source code to be disclosed.

Here are a few of the most popular permissive licenses:

• MIT License: The most popular license type on Github. Notable projects include X Window System, Node.js, jQuery, .NET, Angular, and React. The MIT License explicitly allows the following actions over the BSD license where the following is merely implied: merging, publishing, sublicensing, and selling.
• BSD License: There are multiple versions of the BSD license ranging from essentially a 'public domain license' to restrictions on copyright notice and advertising.
• Apache License: Similar to the MIT license but with greater specificity about contributor's obligations with the aim to minimize the risk of potential lawsuits. This is the third most popular license on GitHub.

Copyleft Licenses

Copyleft licenses, on the other hand, grant certain rights and forbids proprietary derived works. A common copyleft software license includes the GPL family of Licenses (which includes GPL, LGPL, and AGPL). These are high risk for companies to use in proprietary software because derived projects must be released under the same license and version and source code must be disclosed for the derived project. This is not a good choice for businesses wanting to keep their software private.

There are many more differences between all of these licenses and more, but I mainly wanted to point out which licenses are safe for proprietary software for businesses and which ones pose a high risk.

A good resource to summarize licenses is https://www.tldrlegal.com/