The fact that all of you have been arguing for this long over the GPL goes a long way toward showing that the thing it to complicated for anyone without a law degree to safely touch. Also, you have left an important aspect out of all of the arguing over what is better. What if your goal is to have standards? When I worked in the Mayo Clinic informatics division we wouldn't touch the GPL - because we wanted our code to be free to everyone - profit or non-profit. Our goal was to standardize the way that everyone accessed terminologies. If we couldn't get the commercial companies involved with our standards, then we were dead in the water. We used the Apache license (and later, the Eclipse Public License) - specifically because they allowed commercial use of the code - without requiring you to open your own code. This allowed us to have interactions with companies such as IBM - they provided a lot of support to us in debugging some issues on DB2 - because they wanted to be able to use our code. On a similar front - if the Open Office document specifications and implementations were GPL, Microsoft could not ever (reasonably) provide the ability to read or write those formats - even if a government body tells them to. Which explains a lot of why ODF is released under LGPL rather than GPL. If the ODF supporters can walk into a gov't body and tell them that Microsoft can easily support writing to ODF from MSWord - all they have to do it force them to make the business decision to do it - it's an easy sell. If they have to tell them that Microsoft can't support ODF unless they GPL all of MSWord - do you really think they are going to get very far? Apache and Eclipse are two very large and growing software ecosystems. You know why? No GPL! Ton's of commercial companies use their software! And many of those commercial companies have people that spend time fixing bugs in that same software. Like me, for one. GPL is not about free. Its about an impossible to achieve pipe dream. It says that you are not entitled to payment, if you choose, for your work. There is, and always will be a place for commercial software. Declaring commercial software the enemy is not the solution. Quite simply, there are some applications that require massive amounts of money to develop. Forbidding people from charging for the end result does not help create more GPL code. It only makes the existing GPL code that may have been useful, go completely unused. How about tax software? When when do you suppose that the GPL is going to end up providing us with a way to do our taxes? How about never. Do you know how much money it takes to write software to accurately do taxes? The only way we would ever potentially have open source tooling like this is if the gov't funded the development - and then - why would the gov't use a GPL license? Commercial companies should have ever right to build on top of the software as well - just because they want to improve it doesn't mean that they should be forced to give away their improvements. The un-improved code is still available to everyone, just like before... Dan