- at every round of funding, we had to sign documents describing our license content. It was very clear that the money people "knew" that anything with the letters "GPL" was a red-flag. They had no understanding whatsoever of the fine points between GPL and LGPL. It might not stop a funding round, but it definitely slows it down.

- when the company that bought my company was being acquired by IBM, they ran code scans on ALL of our source code during due-diligence. Depending on the specific situation, plans were established to remove or replace code, or even kill a product. I can easily imagine situations where the license analysis would kill a deal. (I spent a couple of miserable months documenting licenses, pedigree, etc. for my small part of the portfolio)

When the financial future of your colleagues depends on these types of decisions, they take on a different level of importance.

-david

On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 10:05 AM, Paolo Bonzini <bonzini@gnu.org> wrote:

> There is no incompatibility between MIT and GPL (although there is
> between Apache and GPL, and parts of Squeak are still under ASL 2.0).

There is no incompatibility between Apache and GPL3, but that's secondary.

> But GPL is viral (and LGPL too if you rip out code and not just link to
> it) so it infects other code used together with the GPLed code. We do
> not want Squeak to become GPL licensed so we need to be careful what
> code to let in.

And to be clear about this once for all, I completely agree with the
above assessment. Squeak people do need to be careful, even a bit
paranoid if you want. But implying that you cannot look at GNU
Smalltalk for fear that you'll glance at its code and be tainted by it,
goes way beyond paranoia.

Paolo