From: Aredridel <aredridel@...>
Date: 2003-07-10T05:41:51+09:00
Subject: Re: My brief and torrid affair with Ruby.

> The fact you can choose to use the GPL or not doesn't make *the license
> itself* any less "prone" (?) to "infect" your code if you DO use it.  In
> other words, if you use it, your code gets tainted with the same license,
> no?

Not "gets tainted". You'll just have to choose to taint it or replace
the library if you're going to distribute it.

Now, look at it from the developer of a library's point of view:

Seems fair to me:  If I put a lot of work into a project for
"humankind's greater good", I don't want people snapping it up and tying
it into some ad-supported piece of "free"-ware, and I don't really want
it tied into some piece of commercial software I can't see.  Part of the
fun of coding for users of open source is getting to see what's done
with it.

That said, I'd probably BSD-license or LGPL (more likely for me) code
that I thought was "useful", but code I thought of as "innovative", I'd
probably GPL.

Ari