Perhaps your confusion is in the distinction between the literal 'using it at work' vs. what I interpreted OP's meaning as incorporating a GPL-licensed OSS proj

Perhaps your confusion is in the distinction between the literal 'using it at work' vs. what I interpreted OP's meaning as incorporating a GPL-licensed OSS project as a dependency of commercial software? The 'problem' with the GPL is easy: commercial software is often distributed to end users only as binaries because it is sold closed-source. The LGPL may be less clear, but there are still problems: LGPL is (was?) not allowed in iOS apps on the Apple app store, is only intended to be used when licensing software libraries, corporate lawyers spidey sense tingles as the license gets into the details of what is a library and linking, etc. The commercial friendliness of the BSD license vs. [L]GPL seems to be fairly self-evident; the FSF summarizes it as a 'lax, permissive non-copyleft free software license'[1]. [1] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#FreeBSD http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#FreeBSD