
Ask HN: Concrete examples of honest people with anything to fear from the GPL - asciilifeform
GPL-related debates seem to be rather short on actual examples of anyone who has <i>anything</i> to fear from the license, who wasn't already doing something obviously questionable (see this for an example: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=610764) Would anyone care to provide some?<p><i>Edit:</i> "My customers/managers/colleagues fear the GPL" is not a valid criticism. Anything with a similar amount of well-funded FUD thrown at it will be similarly feared.
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gojomo
At one level, your question contains the seeds of its own answer. Strong GPL
partisans tend to assume anyone doing things where the GPL language/intent is
fuzzy is "doing something obviously questionable".

So one fear is, you could wind up on the right side of the license and the
law, but still face resentful, accusatory opinions from parts of the
community. And thus a related fear: your project could be distracted by long
discussions like these.

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profquail
Assuming that the GPL holds in court (in whatever country/state you're in), my
biggest fear is that I wouldn't understand some part of it and get into legal
trouble.

With a BSD or MIT license (or even just public domain) on the code you're
using, you know that it's free to use any way you want.

Maybe a bit paranoid, but with a large software project, you (or your boss)
might not want to take that chance, and you'd be stuck buying a commercial
app/library instead.

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bjplink
I'm not sure if this is "obviously questionable" or not but every person who
sells a WordPress theme or plugin apparently doesn't have a leg to stand on if
anyone challenges them by releasing their works for free.

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gojomo
Is there a reason you used 'news.ycombinator.ORG' in the above link?

