I think my comment makes it clear that I assumed (correctly) that you did not mean "only BSD", but all the similar licenses (e.g., MIT). Your second paragraph

I think my comment makes it clear that I assumed (correctly) that you did not mean "only BSD", but all the similar licenses (e.g., MIT). Your second paragraph above is unclear as to which licenses businesses won't accept, or why. In my experience businesses do not accept: - copyleft'ing in any code that could be integrated into proprietary code that might be distributed to customers - advertising clauses (not all BSD licenses have these) - or any clauses that are onerous in any way (the above two are onerous) (I'm not addressing trademark or patent issues here, just copyright. Obviously code distributed under a friendly license but requiring non-free patent grants is generally out.) I'm not sure what you mean by "personal work", but I get the feeling that you mean "not easy to monetize" or "impossible to monetize". Why would you use the GPL for such work? Why would anyone make significant changes to software that can't be monetized and not share alike even without being required to by a GPL-like license? I would absolutely prefer BSD (sans advertising clause) or MIT licensing for "personal work", and I would absolutely recommend it.