What kind of open source agreement should your start-up company use?

Editor's note: This article is from Tomasz Tunguz, the Chinese version is compiled by Heaven Zhuhai Branch Rudder.

Once you decide that you need to introduce an open source library in your product, or that your product itself is an open source software PRODUCT, you have to think about what is best for you in a wide range of open source agreements.

There are now popular open source protocols in the industry, but the most popular one is the three: Gpl,apache, and MIT. One of the things I've always been curious about is the rules of the open source agreement that they choose for many startups using/building open source software, and they are retire to attract investment and investors (exits: This is a translation or withdrawal. If VCs choose to withdraw before the IPO, looking for the next start-up to invest) there is no relationship. Let's see if we can find some clues to help you choose the relevant protocol for your open source product.

Black Duck Duck Software is a company that conducts code-scanning checks to determine that the software is using the correct open source licensing agreement, which it publishes every year to the top 20 open source agreements that are applied to open source projects.

As you can see from the table above, 42% of the developers of open source projects are more inclined to use the GPL open source Protocol series, while MIT is 20% and the last Apache accounts for 16%, which is the top three data. But what you'll see is that companies using Apache open source agreements, compared to companies using other protocols, are getting the most out of their usage rates, which means that investors prefer startups that use the Apache protocol.

As you can see, the Apache Open Source agreement project accounts for only 16 of all open source projects, but receives 50% of the venture capital in order to advance the commercialization of their projects. In fact, this data is largely due to the advancement of data management software and service providers Cloudera,hortonworks and MAPR, which are driving the commercialization of today's hottest Hadoop.

The MIT deal is a bit little wool. Developers in 20% of open source projects chose the MIT protocol as their code open source Agreement, but the MIT project in a commercial project raised only 1% of the venture capital. The anti-GPL project accounted for 42% of the project, gaining 37% per cent of the investment amount.

And for the withdrawal (exits: as described in the beginning of the article, here translation withdrawal, also can be called exit. If VCs opt out after the IPO, looking for the next start-up to invest, including through mergers and acquisitions, the GPL-based project is an overwhelming advantage, creating more than $6 billion in liquidity. And the Apache deal has created $2 billion in liquidity. In the past, this may have been attributed to the GPL for a full 10 years before the time of the Apache agreement. (1989 vs. 2000). In fact, so far, the three largest open-source mergers and acquisitions, Sourcefire (2.4 billion), Novell ($21 billion), MySQL (1 billion), without exception, the use of the GPL is a protocol. Both MySQL and novel have existed before the Apaceh protocol was born (so what can they use without the GPL?). )。

In fact, projects such as Cassandra, which commercialize Hadoop and other commercial startups that use the Apache Open source protocol, are likely to go beyond the GPL in the next 5 years.

In terms of intellectual property rights, there is a fundamental difference between the various agreements here, this article does not do detailed, I believe you ask Google and degrees Niang soon can be informed. In general, the Apache protocol is relatively novel, the adoption of the agreement of the enterprise from the data, will get more investment in VC. However, it is because it is relatively new, the adoption of the agreement of enterprises also basically did not see any substantial return.

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What kind of open source agreement should your start-up company use?