Re: About GPL and proprietary software

After a long battle with technology,scott(dot)marlowe(at)ihs(dot)com ("scott.marlowe"), an earthling, wrote:
> I still feel MySQL is somewhat overstepping the bounds of the GPL.
> The GPL makes it clear that if I don't link to GPL code, I'm not
> bound by it.

If all the other "open source" software had the same kinds of
boundaries, then in order to use Linux + GCC + GLIBC + Apache + Emacs
+ Perl + Some Other Things for "commercial purposes," you'd be
required to pay out $4K in license fees, per host.

And people would naturally see this as disgraceful, not free, and not
bother using the software. If "Linux distributions" were licensed the
way MySQL is, we'd doubtless all drop Linux like a hot potatoe (my
little homage to the political processes of the week around North
America :-)) and adopt *BSD en masse.

The subtle "dig:"

"Linus Torvalds doesn't expect you to pay him $450 per machine if
you run proprietary software on Linux, does he?"
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