Re: Announce: GPL Framework centered on Postgres

* Matteo Beccati:

> Hi,
>
> Florian Weimer wrote:
>> Closed source? It's a PHP framework. 8-)
>> Anyway, for a web application, the GPL is usually *less* restrictive
>> than various BSD license variants because you do not need to mention
>> the software in the end user documentation. The viral aspect of the
>> GPL does not come into play because you do not actually distribute the
>> software. You just run it on your servers.
>
> So you're supposing that no one would ever build a distributable (free
> or commercial) application on your own framework, because if they do
> they are forced to release the whole project under GPL.

If the project is implemented in some kind of scripting language
(which does not offer persistent compilations, or some kind of
compilation which is easily reversed), the GPL vs BSD distinction is
not very important. If you are technically forced to ship the program
as source code, a license that allows you to distribute binaries
without source code does not offer much more freedom than one which
forces you to distribute the source code if you distribute
(non-existent) binaries.