[misnome]

> makes some people really wary of the GPL and other "viral" licenses

It's worse than that surely - as in this case avoiding GPL doesn't prevent the problem. This sounds like for a medium-paranoid-legal perspective, that it would "prove" that even non-GPL code isn't safe, thus discouraging from usage of any open source software [edit: dependencies]

> One can only imagine if it was AGPL instead of GPL

Right, that seems like the only saving grace that avoids this being an potentially apocalyptic event.

[qotgalaxy]

Why would closed source software be safe? Say I copy shared-mime-info completely, compile it, sell it to you as MimeWizardPRO2000, you include it as part of your closed source web framework and sell that. You're still distributing GPL code without making your source available.

[rocqua]

I think it's different if you are re-using source (with GPL notices) or binaries (which don't have them)