15 ms·

Is BSD The New GPL?

91 points by mattyb 17y ago

plinkplonk 17y ago
Zed Shaw gets too much attention for his half baked rants. Which encourages him to compose more half baked rants. Use whatver license you want for [DIETY]'s sake. Just stop going on and on and on about something after all the arguments have been hashed out umpteen times.
- ajross 17y ago
  Indeed. And these web geeks don't know how to do a proper license flame anyway. For real fireworks, go mention Linux on an OpenBSD list.
  - rbanffy 17y ago
    I made a lot of fireworks asking the Fedora channel folks on Freenode for help on extracting the current Fedora look and feel for usage on Ubuntu. In the end, they proved very helpful, but the initial reaction was less than enthusiastic.
- mikeryan 17y ago
  "Use whatver license you want for [DIETY]'s sake. Just stop going on and on and on about something after all the arguments have been hashed out umpteen times." The above is the condensed version of Zed's blog post ;-)
  - plinkplonk 17y ago
    "The above is the condensed version of Zed's blog post ;-)" Exactly the point! That's the only meaningful content in Zed's last two posts. But why use 10 words when two blog posts would suffice? Zed adds a lot of disconnected and illogical ranting (e.g :-> he implies that he is owed a living because he released some open source code! yeah right!) and the attention such content lite posts receive here and elsewhere encourages more such behavior.
- apotheon 17y ago
  "DIETY"? Is that like a deity for dieters?
jnoller 17y ago
Thanks for taking my quote/tweet/whatever out of context, Zed. I was replying to your comment "I find it funny that people cry it's not fair I use the GPL and use their BSD software, but then _don't_ cry when a company uses their gear." Specifically; I was paraphrasing @mjmalone's comments yesterday where he and others were pointing out what they felt was an issue with this. I don't think I, or anyone else who has been discussing this is attacking you, or attempting to diminish the fact you have released Lamson at GPL. I think we all appreciate anyone releasing something as Free/Open Source software, period. However, we can lament the fact we can not use/extend (namely - import) your code to add to it without triggering the GPL requirements within our own code. For me personally, it's an easy choice - I push stuff out under MIT/Apache 2.0/etc and just don't touch/patch/extend things under the GPL. It's your choice, and that's what great about Free/Open source software, and no one is suggesting you, or I, or anyone give up that freedom. Additionally; some of us write software for a living, for companies who pay us money. Not all of them are these evil, soulless entities you seemingly despise. I, and many others have been lucky enough to work for companies who use open source software, and give back as well, in the form of released code, patches, etc. We don't "love" evil corporations - we simply work for those which are not evil (in our eyes) and we attempt to promote ethical open source behavior within those companies. Heck; some of us have even gotten to dedicate time to open source projects on company time. Even for those companies (ones with an open source culture), the GPL can become more of a pain to deal with, and can quickly outstrip the benefits of using that GPLed software rather than "using something else".
- boris 17y ago
  However, we can lament the fact we can not use/extend (namely - import) your code to add to it without triggering the GPL requirements within our own code. Zed's point is that the "BSD folks" seem to complain more when someone releases their code under the GPL than when a company releases this same code under a completely proprietary license. In case of the GPL'ed code you can at least study it, get some ideas, and perhaps provide your own BSD'ed implementation. In other words you complain more about people that give you something than about people that give you nothing. I do find this strange.
  - 17y ago
mdasen 17y ago
I think that the BSD license has gained favor because, in the web space, the GPL only offers hassle, not protection. Let's say you release a new Web 2.0 app as GPL and I take the code and want to make a closed-source, proprietary thing off of it. Well, I can. Since I'm not distributing the code (merely running it on my servers as Software as a Service), I don't have to contribute back. I can make additions, incorporate your additions so I don't fall behind and start making my service look better than the open source code. BSD has come into fashion because either 1) you're not going to release the code and nether license helps there or 2) you're going to release the code in which case the GPL's length and requirements are just an annoyance. The GPL simply doesn't protect web code in the way that it protects desktop apps. And so developers feel no need to use the GPL - it doesn't offer them anything and only serves to do things like make employers nervous or the like. The AGPL (Affero) is a different story. . .
- hs 17y ago
  i find softwares under bsd license are better than gpl equivalents -- maybe because i use openbsd
  - rbanffy 17y ago
    Really? Why?
    - hs 17y ago
      you just have to use it and feel the difference, i won't spoil the fun
    - apotheon 17y ago
      Didn't he just say it might be because he uses OpenBSD?
absconditus 17y ago
Is there any reason to continue this drama on HN?
- tptacek 17y ago
  If you figure out a way to stop this kind of drama, you will have made a key discovery about managing online communities. Let us know if you do.
- pyre 17y ago
  Not necessarily, but hopefully some of that arguments by either side will have at least some informative parts to them which will help out HN readers. At the very least, it might cause HN readers to apply some critical thinking (and research) of their own to the BSD vs GPL debate in their own personal/commercial projects and possibly avoid some of the pitfalls of either approach.
rmgraham 17y ago
GPL wants you to share. BSD wants you to want to share.
- callahad 17y ago
  Yep; I like the BSD + "social pressure viral clause" license as a proxy for "This is open, and I don't want to be a dick about it, but I'd appreciate if you reciprocated."
  - lutorm 17y ago
    Is that the way you approach other contracts, too?
    - rmgraham 17y ago
      These licenses follow copyright law, not contract law. If they were contracts, there would be little question of whether they were enforceable and "GPL enforceability tested.." would not appear in nearly as many headlines as it does.
      - deleted 17y ago
        [deleted]
      - joeyo 17y ago
        That is what's so brilliant about the GPL: if you accept the contract, then you are bound by it's terms. If you reject the contract (or plan to argue in court that it for some reason is invalid or does not apply to you) then you are still bound by copyright law!
        apotheon 17y ago
        It's still not a contract, no matter how many times you say it is. See above.
    - callahad 17y ago
jcsalterego 17y ago
"Is X The New Y?", TechCrunch style.
- apotheon 17y ago
  What? X Combinator? What's that all about?
tdavis 17y ago
The way I see it, I've utilized so much free software over the years and made use of so many man-years of development that I couldn't care less if I am given any attribution for the code I write (which is why I pretty much exclusively license under MIT/X11). I've never explicitly given credit to the thousands of committers who've made my life insanely easier over the years, so I don't really care if others do the same for me. If the logs indicate people are downloading the code, that's good enough for me. Hopefully they get some use out of it. Now let's all just shut up about this nonsense and be friends :)
rick888 17y ago
Why is this guy zed getting so much coverage? If you have something under the BSD license, you can do anything you want with it (complete freedom). This is not the case with the GPL license (proprietary apps are a good example). This is why many people choose to use apps only under the BSD license.
- Zak 17y ago
  The celebrity effect is present to a lesser degree in hacker culture, but it's still there. Zed wrote Mongrel, which helped make Rails a practical option for more people, so he's famous. That means he gets attention when he does something less noteworthy, like post rants against people who whine about what he's willing to let them do with code he gives away free of charge.
  - drawkbox 17y ago
    He didn't get famous from writing Mongrel. He got famous when he called Rails a ghetto. You can look this past up. Right or wrong that is what propelled him into the news. This is the same formula. I would say Zed knows more about marketing than he leads on because drama is one way to really advertise things. People and programmers especially, love a good versus, it is a natural, competitive, easily manipulated feature/function of psychology. It is possible that Zed was motivated entirely to write this just to have the GPL vs. BSD argument in public. Maybe that was the whole point.
    - mattyb 17y ago
      If that was the point, I'm glad he did it. I'd read both licenses before, but hadn't given their ramifications too much thought. I'm probably not speaking for just myself when I say that I used to believe that 'FOSS' == 'GPL'. The discussion about his (and Jacob's) articles has cleared up some issues for me, and I'm sure more people give the license choice more thought now.
    - rbanffy 17y ago
      "He didn't get famous from writing Mongrel" His whole rant is because he didn't get famous for writing Mongrel. In fact, I (and just about everyone else) never heard of him before he called Rails a ghetto. And yes, I also find him very predictable.
JesseAldridge 17y ago
One question with regard to the GPL: Is it at all enforceable? How could you find out if someone violating it and using your code in a proprietary project?
- zaius 17y ago
  Well, you have access to the binaries. You could tell if strings are the same pretty easily. I'm sure there's a way to compare more. No doubt there are people doing it, but the risk is just too large for any sensible company - it would need one malicious person to leak that there was GPL code in a project, and they would have to release the source of the whole project.
  - ZeroGravitas 17y ago
    Unfortunately there's plenty of non-"sensible" companies out there. The most recent example was Atari using ScummVM for Wii games: http://sev-notes.blogspot.com/2009/06/gpl-scummvm-and-violations.html http://sev-notes.blogspot.com/2009/06/gpl-scummvm-and-violat... Also notable was the long running Cisco case where every time the FSF thought they'd reached an agreement it would be revealed that yet another product violated the GPL. http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/2008-12-cisco-complaint http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/2008-12-cisco-complaint
    - pyre 17y ago
      Note that in the ScummVM case, Atari had no problem with the GPL'd code... until their lawyer informed them that Nintendo's API license didn't allow them to open source code like that. And in Atari's defense the code was outsourced two layers deep to some place in Eastern Europe. i.e. Atari had no idea there was GPL'd code in there until they were notified. They were cool with keeping to the license until they realized there was a conflict with Nintendo's Wii API license... then they hunkered down and git tight-lipped. That seems pretty normal. Once the lawyers realized that the company was probably in the wrong, they when into 'damage-control' mode to try and minimize the losses to Atari.
  - pyre 17y ago
zaius 17y ago
I think Zed underestimates the value of his contribution of Mongrel. It's a great piece of code. I certainly wouldn't have heard of him if it wasn't for that. I doubt his blog posts would be making it to number 1 on hacker news without it.
- grandalf 17y ago
  Zed is good at creating silly controversy and buzz. Nobody I know has used mongrel for several years... though it was influential at the time.
  - zaius 17y ago
    Several years? I must be outdated. What are you using now? Thin?
    - grandalf 17y ago
      Thin and Passenger -- to be fair Thin is essentially mongrel + rack... picked up after Zed decided to stop maintaining mongrel.
DanielStraight 17y ago
I seem to be in a huge minority, but I think Zed is right on here (and in many other places).
- boucher 17y ago
  I'm not really sure it is a minority, or at least not as much as it may seem here on Hacker News. I recall reading that the GPL is by far the single most popular open source license. Can't seem to be able to back it up though. Either way, something like 25% of projects listed on ohloh are licensed under the GPL, so its hardly a small minority of the free software community.
  - silentbicycle 17y ago
    Several licenses are typically lumped together as BSD-like licenses, especially when comparing to the GPL. How about when the numbers for the BSD, 3-clause BSD, MIT, ISC, etc. are combined? (Counting the GPL is likewise combining GPL v. 2, GPL v. 3, LGPL, etc., I expect.)
  - cdibona 17y ago
    That's an incorrect number. If you look at the open source code on the internet, it hovers around 47% to 48% (with a greater than 2b unique project lines sample. About 22% are lgpl, though, so maybe that's what you meant.
- SwellJoe 17y ago
  You're not in the minority. Fanatics are just loud. Zed is the odd man out by being both loud and non-fanatical about licenses. We have projects under both licenses, representing a half million lines of code, and I rarely rant about licenses.
  - apotheon 17y ago
    > You're not in the minority. Fanatics are just loud. Hmmm. That statement has implications you may not have intended.
petercooper 17y ago
Petty squabbling over bullshit like this, and even worse doing it in such a contradictory way, is stupid. This kind of useless bickering doesn’t help promote excellent software and “freedom” to express yourself with code. I have a kettle you can meet, Zed.
s3graham 17y ago
/* ** 2001 September 15 ** ** The author disclaims copyright to this source code. In place of ** a legal notice, here is a blessing: ** ** May you do good and not evil. ** May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others. ** May you share freely, never taking more than you give. ** ************************************************************************* ** Main file for the SQLite library. The routines in this file ...
pelle 17y ago
This discussion is ridiculous. Zed is completely within his right to release any code he wants under whatever license he wants. First of all how many of us deploy our applications using Mysql on Linux (both GPL'ed projects). It's not an issue. Lamson is generally for server applications. If you use it you don't need to release your application as GPL. Come on. From what I've seen of lamson, most apps based on it will run separately from a web application and often be quite small. If your Lamson project gets large and you want to release it, what is wrong with GPL for that? Secondly, what is wrong with Zed actually trying to make a living. Why is it so wrong for him to want to capitalize on what looks like a great project to pay his rent. When was that a crime. Those of you in salaried jobs who complain about this should be ashamed of yourselves. When you're a freelancer like Zed you have to hustle and thats exactly what he's doing. MySQL is offered Dual License together with many other projects. I don't know how successful this has been nor how successful it will be for Zed, but he's got a right to try.

91 points by mattyb 17y ago

Zed Shaw gets too much attention for his half baked rants. Which encourages him to compose more half baked rants. Use whatver license you want for [DIETY]'s sake. Just stop going on and on and on about something after all the arguments have been hashed out umpteen times.

ajross 17y ago
Indeed. And these web geeks don't know how to do a proper license flame anyway. For real fireworks, go mention Linux on an OpenBSD list.
- rbanffy 17y ago
  I made a lot of fireworks asking the Fedora channel folks on Freenode for help on extracting the current Fedora look and feel for usage on Ubuntu. In the end, they proved very helpful, but the initial reaction was less than enthusiastic.
mikeryan 17y ago
"Use whatver license you want for [DIETY]'s sake. Just stop going on and on and on about something after all the arguments have been hashed out umpteen times." The above is the condensed version of Zed's blog post ;-)
- plinkplonk 17y ago
  "The above is the condensed version of Zed's blog post ;-)" Exactly the point! That's the only meaningful content in Zed's last two posts. But why use 10 words when two blog posts would suffice? Zed adds a lot of disconnected and illogical ranting (e.g :-> he implies that he is owed a living because he released some open source code! yeah right!) and the attention such content lite posts receive here and elsewhere encourages more such behavior.
apotheon 17y ago
"DIETY"? Is that like a deity for dieters?

jnoller 17y ago

Thanks for taking my quote/tweet/whatever out of context, Zed. I was replying to your comment "I find it funny that people cry it's not fair I use the GPL and use their BSD software, but then _don't_ cry when a company uses their gear." Specifically; I was paraphrasing @mjmalone's comments yesterday where he and others were pointing out what they felt was an issue with this. I don't think I, or anyone else who has been discussing this is attacking you, or attempting to diminish the fact you have released Lamson at GPL. I think we all appreciate anyone releasing something as Free/Open Source software, period. However, we can lament the fact we can not use/extend (namely - import) your code to add to it without triggering the GPL requirements within our own code. For me personally, it's an easy choice - I push stuff out under MIT/Apache 2.0/etc and just don't touch/patch/extend things under the GPL. It's your choice, and that's what great about Free/Open source software, and no one is suggesting you, or I, or anyone give up that freedom. Additionally; some of us write software for a living, for companies who pay us money. Not all of them are these evil, soulless entities you seemingly despise. I, and many others have been lucky enough to work for companies who use open source software, and give back as well, in the form of released code, patches, etc. We don't "love" evil corporations - we simply work for those which are not evil (in our eyes) and we attempt to promote ethical open source behavior within those companies. Heck; some of us have even gotten to dedicate time to open source projects on company time. Even for those companies (ones with an open source culture), the GPL can become more of a pain to deal with, and can quickly outstrip the benefits of using that GPLed software rather than "using something else".

boris 17y ago
However, we can lament the fact we can not use/extend (namely - import) your code to add to it without triggering the GPL requirements within our own code. Zed's point is that the "BSD folks" seem to complain more when someone releases their code under the GPL than when a company releases this same code under a completely proprietary license. In case of the GPL'ed code you can at least study it, get some ideas, and perhaps provide your own BSD'ed implementation. In other words you complain more about people that give you something than about people that give you nothing. I do find this strange.
- 17y ago

mdasen 17y ago

I think that the BSD license has gained favor because, in the web space, the GPL only offers hassle, not protection. Let's say you release a new Web 2.0 app as GPL and I take the code and want to make a closed-source, proprietary thing off of it. Well, I can. Since I'm not distributing the code (merely running it on my servers as Software as a Service), I don't have to contribute back. I can make additions, incorporate your additions so I don't fall behind and start making my service look better than the open source code. BSD has come into fashion because either 1) you're not going to release the code and nether license helps there or 2) you're going to release the code in which case the GPL's length and requirements are just an annoyance. The GPL simply doesn't protect web code in the way that it protects desktop apps. And so developers feel no need to use the GPL - it doesn't offer them anything and only serves to do things like make employers nervous or the like. The AGPL (Affero) is a different story. . .

hs 17y ago
i find softwares under bsd license are better than gpl equivalents -- maybe because i use openbsd
- rbanffy 17y ago
  Really? Why?
  - hs 17y ago
    you just have to use it and feel the difference, i won't spoil the fun
  - apotheon 17y ago
    Didn't he just say it might be because he uses OpenBSD?

absconditus 17y ago

Is there any reason to continue this drama on HN?

tptacek 17y ago
If you figure out a way to stop this kind of drama, you will have made a key discovery about managing online communities. Let us know if you do.
pyre 17y ago
Not necessarily, but hopefully some of that arguments by either side will have at least some informative parts to them which will help out HN readers. At the very least, it might cause HN readers to apply some critical thinking (and research) of their own to the BSD vs GPL debate in their own personal/commercial projects and possibly avoid some of the pitfalls of either approach.

rmgraham 17y ago

GPL wants you to share. BSD wants you to want to share.

callahad 17y ago
Yep; I like the BSD + "social pressure viral clause" license as a proxy for "This is open, and I don't want to be a dick about it, but I'd appreciate if you reciprocated."
- lutorm 17y ago
  Is that the way you approach other contracts, too?
  - rmgraham 17y ago
    These licenses follow copyright law, not contract law. If they were contracts, there would be little question of whether they were enforceable and "GPL enforceability tested.." would not appear in nearly as many headlines as it does.
    - deleted 17y ago
      [deleted]
    - joeyo 17y ago
      That is what's so brilliant about the GPL: if you accept the contract, then you are bound by it's terms. If you reject the contract (or plan to argue in court that it for some reason is invalid or does not apply to you) then you are still bound by copyright law!
      - apotheon 17y ago
        It's still not a contract, no matter how many times you say it is. See above.
  - callahad 17y ago

jcsalterego 17y ago

"Is X The New Y?", TechCrunch style.

apotheon 17y ago
What? X Combinator? What's that all about?

tdavis 17y ago

The way I see it, I've utilized so much free software over the years and made use of so many man-years of development that I couldn't care less if I am given any attribution for the code I write (which is why I pretty much exclusively license under MIT/X11). I've never explicitly given credit to the thousands of committers who've made my life insanely easier over the years, so I don't really care if others do the same for me. If the logs indicate people are downloading the code, that's good enough for me. Hopefully they get some use out of it. Now let's all just shut up about this nonsense and be friends :)

rick888 17y ago

Why is this guy zed getting so much coverage? If you have something under the BSD license, you can do anything you want with it (complete freedom). This is not the case with the GPL license (proprietary apps are a good example). This is why many people choose to use apps only under the BSD license.

Zak 17y ago
The celebrity effect is present to a lesser degree in hacker culture, but it's still there. Zed wrote Mongrel, which helped make Rails a practical option for more people, so he's famous. That means he gets attention when he does something less noteworthy, like post rants against people who whine about what he's willing to let them do with code he gives away free of charge.
- drawkbox 17y ago
  He didn't get famous from writing Mongrel. He got famous when he called Rails a ghetto. You can look this past up. Right or wrong that is what propelled him into the news. This is the same formula. I would say Zed knows more about marketing than he leads on because drama is one way to really advertise things. People and programmers especially, love a good versus, it is a natural, competitive, easily manipulated feature/function of psychology. It is possible that Zed was motivated entirely to write this just to have the GPL vs. BSD argument in public. Maybe that was the whole point.
  - mattyb 17y ago
    If that was the point, I'm glad he did it. I'd read both licenses before, but hadn't given their ramifications too much thought. I'm probably not speaking for just myself when I say that I used to believe that 'FOSS' == 'GPL'. The discussion about his (and Jacob's) articles has cleared up some issues for me, and I'm sure more people give the license choice more thought now.
  - rbanffy 17y ago
    "He didn't get famous from writing Mongrel" His whole rant is because he didn't get famous for writing Mongrel. In fact, I (and just about everyone else) never heard of him before he called Rails a ghetto. And yes, I also find him very predictable.

JesseAldridge 17y ago

One question with regard to the GPL: Is it at all enforceable? How could you find out if someone violating it and using your code in a proprietary project?

zaius 17y ago
Well, you have access to the binaries. You could tell if strings are the same pretty easily. I'm sure there's a way to compare more. No doubt there are people doing it, but the risk is just too large for any sensible company - it would need one malicious person to leak that there was GPL code in a project, and they would have to release the source of the whole project.
- ZeroGravitas 17y ago
  Unfortunately there's plenty of non-"sensible" companies out there. The most recent example was Atari using ScummVM for Wii games: http://sev-notes.blogspot.com/2009/06/gpl-scummvm-and-violations.html http://sev-notes.blogspot.com/2009/06/gpl-scummvm-and-violat... Also notable was the long running Cisco case where every time the FSF thought they'd reached an agreement it would be revealed that yet another product violated the GPL. http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/2008-12-cisco-complaint http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/2008-12-cisco-complaint
  - pyre 17y ago
    Note that in the ScummVM case, Atari had no problem with the GPL'd code... until their lawyer informed them that Nintendo's API license didn't allow them to open source code like that. And in Atari's defense the code was outsourced two layers deep to some place in Eastern Europe. i.e. Atari had no idea there was GPL'd code in there until they were notified. They were cool with keeping to the license until they realized there was a conflict with Nintendo's Wii API license... then they hunkered down and git tight-lipped. That seems pretty normal. Once the lawyers realized that the company was probably in the wrong, they when into 'damage-control' mode to try and minimize the losses to Atari.
- pyre 17y ago

zaius 17y ago

I think Zed underestimates the value of his contribution of Mongrel. It's a great piece of code. I certainly wouldn't have heard of him if it wasn't for that. I doubt his blog posts would be making it to number 1 on hacker news without it.

grandalf 17y ago
Zed is good at creating silly controversy and buzz. Nobody I know has used mongrel for several years... though it was influential at the time.
- zaius 17y ago
  Several years? I must be outdated. What are you using now? Thin?
  - grandalf 17y ago
    Thin and Passenger -- to be fair Thin is essentially mongrel + rack... picked up after Zed decided to stop maintaining mongrel.

DanielStraight 17y ago

I seem to be in a huge minority, but I think Zed is right on here (and in many other places).

boucher 17y ago
I'm not really sure it is a minority, or at least not as much as it may seem here on Hacker News. I recall reading that the GPL is by far the single most popular open source license. Can't seem to be able to back it up though. Either way, something like 25% of projects listed on ohloh are licensed under the GPL, so its hardly a small minority of the free software community.
- silentbicycle 17y ago
  Several licenses are typically lumped together as BSD-like licenses, especially when comparing to the GPL. How about when the numbers for the BSD, 3-clause BSD, MIT, ISC, etc. are combined? (Counting the GPL is likewise combining GPL v. 2, GPL v. 3, LGPL, etc., I expect.)
- cdibona 17y ago
  That's an incorrect number. If you look at the open source code on the internet, it hovers around 47% to 48% (with a greater than 2b unique project lines sample. About 22% are lgpl, though, so maybe that's what you meant.
SwellJoe 17y ago
You're not in the minority. Fanatics are just loud. Zed is the odd man out by being both loud and non-fanatical about licenses. We have projects under both licenses, representing a half million lines of code, and I rarely rant about licenses.
- apotheon 17y ago
  > You're not in the minority. Fanatics are just loud. Hmmm. That statement has implications you may not have intended.

petercooper 17y ago

Petty squabbling over bullshit like this, and even worse doing it in such a contradictory way, is stupid. This kind of useless bickering doesn’t help promote excellent software and “freedom” to express yourself with code. I have a kettle you can meet, Zed.

s3graham 17y ago

/* ** 2001 September 15 ** ** The author disclaims copyright to this source code. In place of ** a legal notice, here is a blessing: ** ** May you do good and not evil. ** May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others. ** May you share freely, never taking more than you give. ** ************************************************************************* ** Main file for the SQLite library. The routines in this file ...

pelle 17y ago

This discussion is ridiculous. Zed is completely within his right to release any code he wants under whatever license he wants. First of all how many of us deploy our applications using Mysql on Linux (both GPL'ed projects). It's not an issue. Lamson is generally for server applications. If you use it you don't need to release your application as GPL. Come on. From what I've seen of lamson, most apps based on it will run separately from a web application and often be quite small. If your Lamson project gets large and you want to release it, what is wrong with GPL for that? Secondly, what is wrong with Zed actually trying to make a living. Why is it so wrong for him to want to capitalize on what looks like a great project to pay his rent. When was that a crime. Those of you in salaried jobs who complain about this should be ashamed of yourselves. When you're a freelancer like Zed you have to hustle and thats exactly what he's doing. MySQL is offered Dual License together with many other projects. I don't know how successful this has been nor how successful it will be for Zed, but he's got a right to try.