It’s Your Party (i.e. GPL Licensing)
Special thanks for John Gruber over at Daring Fireball for finding the post at http://www.red-sweater.com/blog/825/getting-pretty-lonely
I don’t know about you, but I’ve had serious concerns (like most of the REALbasic community) about using MySQL database servers because the GPL-style licensing makes me nervous. I’d love to use it but if it means I’m on the hook for licensing fees and/or have to release my source code of my apps that use I’d much rather not bother with it. ARBP did a survey last fall that pretty much showed MySQL usage down 20% and PostgreSQL (which has very liberal licensing) up about the same amount.
Any way you slice it, to us mere mortals the GPL is vague at best. We’re programmers for heaven’s sake! We don’t write vague code because vague code doesn’t work. Be explicit like the MIT license – it’s clear and concise and is far from ambiguous. I think the GPL should be rewritten to make it explicitly clear.
I didn’t mean to start a whole blog post about someone else’s blog post but I know that there are a lot of questions about GPL and what it means to the developer. What are your thoughts on the GPL?
