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Relevant: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/04/pick-a-license-any-license.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/04/pick-a-license-any-...

• Nursie 14y ago
  Amusing but the description of the GPL is a bit off "The archetypal bearded, sandal-clad free software license. Your code can never be used in any proprietary program, ever! Take that, capitalism!" GPL absolutely can be used in closed source, it just can't be distributed as closed source (see the much rumoured, heavily customised Google-internal-linux as an example). The AGPL is more like the statement above.
  • falcolas 14y ago
    Sadly, the definition of "distribution" is so vague that many lawyers won't allow you to "distribute" your code to a box you don't own outright, in an effort to reduce their liability. I've been in a few companies where this was a problem, since we were working in part for the government, which required us to run our code in nodes which were owned by a separate contractor. The lawyers interpreted that as distribution, and we had to replace the GPL'd portions of code we were using.
    • Nursie 14y ago
      That doesn't seem all that unreasonable to me, you have really distributed to someone else at that point if they own the box, so at the least the GPL kicks in for them.