You're basically agreeing with me outside the internal/throwaway categorization. Your post adds some good details and categories. It's almost all proprietary. S

You're basically agreeing with me outside the internal/throwaway categorization. Your post adds some good details and categories. It's almost all proprietary. Some are supporting a bit more openness or modification allowed than before but always a cut-off point where I loose rights to benefit their wallets. There's a tiny percentage of companies working with truly open and free stuff pervasively but a good chance average public will never have heard of them with notable exception being Firefox. And that one's revenue for development and maintenance depends on several, proprietary platforms that themselves make money selling off users via surveillance. Bright, big picture, eh? :) "Internal and throwaway software is almost always free - the users and developers are either one and the same, or both are part of the same organization." This one is proprietary, shared source by default. In practice, it may have the advantages of FOSS for users within the company. It depends on the politics of the company, what 3rd party stuff it integrated with what licensing terms, and so on. Medium-to-large companies like IBM also treat stuff in one unit as owned by that unit even charging other units for using it often with a discount or certain allotment for free usage. Quite the opposite of FOSS. Now, if hobbyists or companies share their internal or throwaway code, they have to put a specific license on it. They might throw it on Sourceforge or Github but I still have no right to it without a license. This is why we encourage an open-source default on submissions to code sharing sites w/ user able to change it to another if they choose. So, status of throwaways and internal software still varies. And that's without getting to the fact that patent suits can hit you if a license doesn't factor in patents. It's why I don't fully trust BSD licenses as ensuring anyone can use it when it is something covered by patents.