By "business friendly" I take it you mean they can take code without compensation of any kind. Wanting something for nothing is what you always accuse Linux people of doing.
And you are woefully misinformed if you think accidentally releasing a derivitave work of another's code that includes your code means that your work can be confiscated. You essentially have two choices: make your work GPL or go to court with the copyright owners of the works you distributed without a license and get rightfully reamed.
To put it in proprietary terms you can understand: If you start selling PCs with a modified Windows without a license, you usually have two choices: retroactively pay the licenses plus a penalty and get a contract for future licenses, or go to court against Microsoft and get rightfully reamed.
They're both the same concept, only in the GPL world the out of court settlement payment isn't in cash, but in labor.
The central case, a 2003 suit against IBM (IBM ), an important corporate promoter of Linux, has degenerated into a messy contract dispute with no intellectual-property issues left on the table. SCO's threats to sue companies that use Linux have almost entirely evaporated.
That's certainly true. They lost Daimler/Chrysler spectacularly, the IBM case is languishing with the judge ready to grant extremely damaging summary judgements the moment discovery is over, and their Autozone case is looking worse every day, with SCO lying to the court ("misstatements" in Autozone's polite writing).
But open-source proponents also have to get their own intellectual-property house in order.
That's true. Many of these projects, especially Apache, have produced patent-worthy code, at least in today's warped environment. They should have built up their own patent arsenal to cross-license.
The GPL not only requires that any programs licensed under it be freely distributed but also that any modifications made to the software, or any other software derived from it, are themselves automatically covered by the GPL.
I know, having to follow a license in order to distribute another's code is just such a strange concept.
, and few disputes involving it have gotten to court, so case law has done little to clarify its meaning.
Correct. In this country everybody but NuSphere (who lost) has backed down immediately and complied, even Cisco. Germany has had cases successfully prosecuted for netfilter/iptables because home router manufacturers didn't think they had to comply with a license to distribute the works of others.
No I'm not, I'm obviously well informed if I understand the license and how it's used in the industry even better than it's rabid supporters.