I mostly agree with antirez on this. When I was first starting on the Fogbeam Labs[1] projects, I thought a lot about what license to use. The "stock" model for "commercial open source" seems to be to use the GPL, with the business model rooted in the idea of "people pay if they want to use the code without conforming to the GPL". But somehow that never seemed quite right to me. We're doing enterprise software, and - by and large - I doubt most of the firms who would ever use our products would ever want to redistribute them, and would never wind up having an GPL issues to begin with.

And, like antirez, I just want our stuff to be used, even if the business side of things never takes off at all. I finally decided to go with the Apache License v2. The risk, obviously, is that it is now possible for a competitor to fork our stuff and compete with us, even if their product is closed source. On the "pro" side, however, is the "business friendly" perception of the ALv2 and the absence of the stigma which is (fairly or unfairly) associated with the GPL.

As far as the risk of competitors goes... I figure we should, to paraphrase Steve Blank, "be so lucky as to be successful enough that somebody would want to fork and compete using our stuff". And if somebody does a closed source fork, we'll be happy to compete with them anyway, since we believe that being closed / proprietary is a competitive disadvantage in 2013. Simply, we believe that the world is moving more and more towards a place where software is expected to be open source, and where being open source will be part of the "cost of doing business". Obviously this hasn't yet bubbled up to the point where the SAS's, or SAP's of the world are being forced to go open source, but I think that day is coming. Or, at least, the day is coming when there will be significant OSS competition for SAS, SAP, etc. I'd mention Oracle, but Oracle is already a big part of the OSS world, after acquiring Sun. Think about that for a minute... for better or worse, freaking Oracle is one of the biggest players in the "commercial OSS" space.

Many developers do a lot of work in their free time for passion, only a small percentage happens to be payed for their contribution to open source.

Of all the reason I wanted to start a company, and an "open source company" in particular, this is a huge one... I want very much to one day be able to hire programmers, lots of programmers, and pay them to work on open source projects. It's kind of the old saw about "if you can't find the job you want, create it". I never found the company I'd ideally love to work for, so I want to create that company, a company that's hacker friendly, largely engineering driven, and a place where people will be excited to hack on the stuff they're hacking on.

"But", you might protest, "who wants to work on enterprise software"? Well, that doesn't necessarily mean what you think it does. "Enterprise software" doesn't have to be boring. It's not all CRUD screens for updating customer records. We're talking about social software, machine learning, text analytics, search, knowledge management, semantic web, and related stuff here. If you would, for example, find hacking on Lucene or Mahout or Activiti or S4 or Kafka or Hadoop or something of that nature, then we're on the same page. Heck, or Redis as far as that goes. Redis certainly could be "enterprise software" in some contexts.

Edit: vis-a-vis some of the other discussions on the post, I just want to be clear about one thing: At Fogbeam our stance is that if/when we fork an existing OSS project, our modifications will always remain open and freely available to all, even if the license doesn't require it. Everything we are working with right now is code we've written ourselves, and it's all ALv2 anyway, and it's all on Github for the taking. That is the way we expect to always do things, even if we did, for example a "Fogbeam Distribution of Hadoop" or something like that. We also develop with an open bug tracker, publicly available mailing lists, etc. When we talk about being "an open source company" we're not just talking about the license(s). We're not interested in a Google/Android model where we build stuff in the dark and then throw it over the wall in piece-meal fashion and then ignore the community.

[1]: http://www.fogbeam.com