I don't think that's true at all. Anyone who's spent any time at all in open source has a pretty good idea what their obligations under the GPL are. There may b

I don't think that's true at all. Anyone who's spent any time at all in open source has a pretty good idea what their obligations under the GPL are. There may be corner cases debated on the internet by geeks who ANAL, but if those actually matter to your business, simply asking someone at the SFC or SFLC will quickly clear them up [0]. I'll quote LWN's summary [1] from the talk Bob Young of Red Hat gave at LCA this January: He has long been a staunch advocate of the GPL, he said, but not because he has detailed opinions of the differences between it and other, similar licenses. Rather, he said, he learned early on that customers do not care about the details of free-software licenses, and that diving into an explanation of them was the fastest way to send a potential customer running toward the competition. ... With the GPL, everyone knows what the rules are, more or less, so the debate is over quickly. They might not actually know the rules, he added, but they think they do, which amounts to the same thing. As a "business guy," he said, he is always trying to simplify the "pitch" - the GPL tells everyone "what we're about," so it has the greatest impact. [0] We did this when we wanted to publish a royalty-free patent license tied to certain code, and wanted to be sure it would not keep people from using that code in GPLv3 projects. We were reasonably sure of our interpretation of the terms, but it's always nice to double-check. [1] https://lwn.net/Articles/629413/ https://lwn.net/Articles/629413/