[fire]

TIL about ULID[0]; It looks interesting, but the spec was last touched in 2019 and I haven't really heard of it before... is it actively used?

Also curious because I don't actually know: If a format spec is GPL, does that encumber implementations of said spec?

0: https://github.com/ulid/spec

[unscaled]

The part that was last touched in 2019 is the spec + homepage. By this measure, UUID was last touched in 2005 (if we count RFC 4122).

Most ULID implementations are still actively maintained and people are still using it in production. Most implementations also have liberal license like MIT so no, you should not worry about the GPL spec (unless you plan to distribute the spec with your app).

[fire]

Nice! I just hadn't seen it referenced anywhere before - the last big ID wave I can remember was the swath of content about moving to snowflake style IDs