I’ve got a ton of backlogged posts that are half finished. Nearly all of them are opinion pieces in which I get most of the way through an argument and then re-read and think that no one will want to bother with this. Every so often, I’ll go and delete them.

Today, I was writing on the latest GPL brouhaha between Matt Mullenweg and Daniel Jalkut. In the end, I basically think that the GPL asserts way too many restrictions on developers and that Matt erroneously believes that the GPL protects the user’s freedom. In essence, I wonder “who is my user?” Is it the person that uses the source that I’ve made available or the people who benefit from the resulting software? I believe that my users are only the people who download my software, not all of the people who download someone else’s software that happens to make use of my code. Perhaps a tenuous distinction to some, but I ultimately feel that the GPL’s ability to infect all code (even stuff with absolutely no relation to the GPL’d software) within a project is a particularly worrisome measure that unfairly and undeservedly undermines the rights of the developer. After all, the GPL is free as in herpes.

For the record, I have used and released GPL’d software but I now tend release my own code into the public domain (although I believe some are still BSD or MIT licensed). I believe that the public domain provides the greatest freedom to my users (both the end user who doesn’t care about the source and the developer that finds something useful in it).