While the difference between copyright and copyleft seems to be intuitive at first glance, the comparison between strong copyleft, weak copyleft and even non-copyleft licenses is a bit more complex and deserves a few examples to be clarified; the choice between the different options in terms of copyleft licensing may substantially impact business ability in developing new products and if the case profit from them, let’s see how.
Strong copyleft licenses demand derived works to retain the license of the original licensed product, software cannot be made proprietary, the most common type of those licenses is GPL, the GNU General public License. GPL is good for the end-user, who is accorded several rights, but it has some business downsides mostly because it carries the requirement that the recipient of the software has to pass all the freedoms included by the strong copyleft license to the next end-user of the derivate product. For example, companies that work with the Linux kernel and distribute it are obligated to make source available to their users. This is frequently a problem when companies distribute modified GPL'ed software like the Linux kernel in embedded devices and neglect to make the source available. GPL licenses are today in decline, in favour of more permissive licensing.
Licenses with weak copyleft, are as the name entails are weekend kind
of copyleft licenses where even fewer rights are accorded to the original owner, widely
used in software libraries (collection of code used to create other programs).
The main benefit of weak copyleft is that it allows better software integration
requiring less compliance effort than in GPL. For example, the Mozilla Project
uses this kind of license for the Firefox web-browser befitting of all the
possible integration opportunity compared to a strong copyleft. Must be said that Firefox license was ruled as GPL-incompatible, which eventually caused the Mozilla
project to re-license its code under a triple MPL, GPL and LGPL license.
Non-copyleft licenses (also known as public domain licenses,
BSD-style licenses, Permissive free software licenses, or “Copy centre licenses”)
have seen a wide increase in use in the last years, they grant the most of
freedom to software developers and so to the business ready to source from
them. For example, the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) uses a few open-source
initiative for its software. The majority of Android software is licensed with
Apache 2.0. While the project strives to adhere to the preferred license, there
are exceptions, which are handled on a case-by-case basis.
Source:
CIO – ‘How Open Source Licenses
Affect Your Business and Your Developers’
https://www.cio.com/article/2400153/how-open-source-licenses-affect-your-business-and-your-developers.html
Shlomfish.org – ‘Types of
Licences’
Source.android.com – “Licenses”
https://source.android.com/setup/start/licenses
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