Open source licenses: What, which, and why
Summary
For example, both Google and IBM offer royalty-free usage of portions of their patent portfolio to open source projects—and your project, no matter how "free" you consider it, may not qualify with a home-grown license. This type of license—sometimes dismissively or fearfully referred to as "viral"—is the one attached to such famous projects as the Linux kernel, the GNU C Compiler, and the WordPress content management system. In order to better understand its impact, well look at one real AGPL licensed project and a fictitious scenario involving a large company that might wish to adopt it. Lets imagine a hypothetical company—well call the company PB LLC, and their product Plopbox—that decides to spin up a large commercial site offering paid access to managed, hosted Nextcloud instances. Although the SFC states this in no uncertain terms, it expresses "sympathy" to Canonicals goals, and its conclusion focuses on asking Oracle (the CDDLs license steward, as the current owners of Sun Microsystems) to resolve the issue.
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