I'm not sure if looking at the problem of license from the business point of view is reasonable. If Bruno's goal was to make the business people happy, he would put his software into the public domain. But I'm guessing he is more interested in getting some help from others and maybe building a small community around the project. In my opinion this works best when code is collectively own and protected from abuse (e.g. proprietary forks).
The assumed connection between the number of users and a scale of contributions does not sound right to me. Depending on the chosen license there would be different number and type of contributions. Non-copyleft license doesn't encourage contribution, it encourages the use. The code can be taken by everyone who will leave an attribution note for exchange, but usually not more than that. Unless the rate of development of the project is very high, the business would always prefer to fork a project and maintain proprietary changes on their own, over a struggle with upstream integration. Copyleft license encourages the contribution, as it protects the code from being abused, so no risk of being taken advantage of and more likely that some developers will join you. On the users side, however, it scares of "the integrators", people who have a number of different pieces of code that they don't want to or can't release as a free software. The question that remains is if the copyleft licenses can be used by business at all? Let's limit the discussion to the most common case of "customizers", people who adapt software to the needs of their clients (e.g. making extensions or plugins) or use it to build custom products (e.g. websites). Now, we need to remember that when the work is being released, the license is between the business and its client. Not between the business and the entire world. So the freedoms of the software are granted to the client only and it is up to him to decide if he wants to distribute the software any further. If he does, only then he will be bounded by the copyleft clause to do it on the same terms. It doesn't matter if it is AGPL, GPL, LGPL or BSD, the effect here is the same. The only difference is the case of deploying the software on a server, which according to AGPL is a form of distribution and would require making the source code available upon request. However, in practice it is not always a concern, e.g. when the target deployment happens in the intranet. Saying that legal department avoids GPL or AGPL and not saying *why* is not very convincing. Argument from authority is not enough. I could agree, that AGPL might be not very convincing as it seems to give away for what the customer has paid to everyone. However, you have to remember that potential competition is still bounded by the same license. They could copy your customer's website and to distinguish themselves add some extra features, but at the end they will have to release those changes on AGPL too. Now, nothing stops your customer from using what they did on his website. I dare to say, this would create a fast progressing market with lots of competition. Fair competition, without any artificial market barriers. So does it make sense to demonise it as bad for bussiness?
