[Pet_Ant]

I honestly think the part of open-source that matters most is that it really has no compliance. Free to download is good enough. The fact that you can just download it and use it and don't need to go through legal cannot be understated. Things that are free for private non-commercial use are good enough, because they can be downloaded and used without a PO and getting legal involved. If I wanted to get a $1 donation to the Linux kernel, would never happen. If it's not something that developer's can use behind management's back it's not useful. They'll tell us we have all the ones and zeros we need and are just being lazy.

The people paying the bills don't want better products and just about anything can already be bodged together. Building better products is only desired by the engineers who have no say in the matter.

[cryptonector]

You always have to go through Legal at $WORK, for any serious $WORK. That's because $WORK can't let you 'infect' proprietary code with copyleft code, for example. Typically there will be a list of licenses that require no further approval to use in your work at $WORK, and for everything else you need to ask Legal.

For non-commercial work you do on your own there's really no real limits on what open source you take and use, and that's great, yeah.