Business Success with Open Source

Inbound License Policies

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) has verified a little over 100 licenses as adhering to the Open Source Definition.^[96] This means that only a limited number of FOSS licenses are out there, are you’re unlikely to come across the majority of them. Furthermore, as you learned in ​Types of FOSS Licenses​, FOSS licenses are of only three types: permissive, strong reciprocal (copyleft), and weak reciprocal.

The limited number and types of FOSS licenses can make it easier to create your initial set of policies around how to handle FOSS licenses. These are the commodity policies: they apply to large sets of licenses and can handle about 80 percent of the license compliance questions that will come up in your software development ...