A historical look at what makes the GPL useful. Best quote
All you’re doing by whining about how the GPL makes it impossible to make money off of someone else’s work is to convince me that you’re…
Yes, it is a rant, but understandable in view of the rants and opinions raging about the GPL due to Oracle’s impending purchase of MySQL. For other views Groklaw explains The GPL Barter Cycle, Stallman on selling exceptions to the GPL - a follow up to the letter to the EU Commission, GPL Works No Matter Who Owns the Copyrights, Groklaw’s - Reasons I Believe the Community Should Support the Oracle-Sun Deal. In the end Groklaw comes out against the plan to make money from Open Source code by getting the EU Commission force it to go proprietary.
My personal take on the MySQL deal is that the time to have the concerns was when it was first sold to Sun, not afterwards by trying to revise the deal that Sun made when it first acquired MySQL.
For more background on Software, GPL and Patents there is always Groklaw’s GPL Resources and the amazingly detailed [
An Explanation of Computation Theory for Lawyers](http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20091111151305785), and for the historically minded, the ongoing SCO GPL case.