[gyehuda]

Dear jmillikin Let me make a helpful suggestion that is purely intended to be for your benefit (and if you work for a company, it would significantly help them too): contact an attorney who is familiar with Open Source legalities to get clarity on the obligations associated with distributing derivative works that use GPL. I just checked to make sure that you don't work in my company, 'cuz if you did I'd be very motivated to meet with you ASAP and help you understand some of the issues that GPL poses.

I don't mean to be condescending in my tone. Seriously. But Open Source licensing confuses many people -- and many form their opinions based on blogs (which are probably not very admissible in court), and not on the license text. Many people want and wish that the licenses work in the way they think it ought to. But that's not the way the legal system works.

Much like lawyers can't grok why a misplaced semicolon can cause a computer program to crash, developers don't seem to understand how contract language is interpreted by the legal system. In both cases though, the "interpreter" is very literal and does not heed to the authors intent as much as we might hope.