Having worked at a company that used a tonne of open source, the lawyer's reaction was, IIRC, basically: zlib etc: go nuts. New BSD/MIT/Apache etc: sigh, fine

Having worked at a company that used a tonne of open source, the lawyer's reaction was, IIRC, basically: zlib etc: go nuts. New BSD/MIT/Apache etc: sigh, fine, but you'll need to get it properly registered with legal so that don't forget to add it to that document nobody reads. Old BSD: you're kidding me, right? Stupid/joke license: come back when it has a real license. LGPL: no. GPL: hell no. AGPL: aaargh! Get that off your machine RIGHT NOW! We can't even have that on the premises! The reason for not allowing LGPL is that it's not well-enough defined what linking means, which means it's not worth the risk. The reason for not allowing AGPL is that if your company does anything via the internet, then if any software which is AGPLd gets anywhere near the serving stack, suddenly you're infected. (My current company would rather I didn't use AGPL software at home, even.)