“As open source products first came onto the scene, commercial
software companies viewed them with suspicion. Beyond the obvious
threat of shrinking revenues, there was the undefined yet
frightening-sounding threat of ‘viral licensing’–the ominous,
malevolent force that can infect commercial products and transform
them into open source. The menace of viral licensing is enough to
reduce a brave, aggressive, earnings guidance-busting CEO to a
quivering, impoverished, unrecognizable wreck. (Viral licensing
refers to the unfortunate situation in which a proprietary product
mutates into an open source product due to inadvertently including
some GPL-based code in its source base.)“Recently, however, commercial software companies have taken a
second look at the open source world to understand a more positive
kind of viral infection: the quick building of a user base made
possible by free product downloads…”