Picking a license

[Paul Rubin]

Carl Banks <pavlovevidence at gmail.com> writes:
> If a commercial developer has a EULA that prevents users from
> combining their tools with tools from (say) their competitors, 

Do you mean something like a EULA that stops you from buying a copy of
Oracle and combining it with tools from IBM on the computer that you
install Oracle on?  Those EULAs exist but are not remotely comparable to
the GPL.

> The GPL does exactly that,

No it doesn't (not like the above).  You, the licensee under the GPL,
can make those combinations and use them as much as you want on your own
computers.  You just can't distribute the resulting derivative to other
people.  With proprietary software you can't redistribute the software
to other people from day zero (or even use more copies within your own
company than you've paid for), regardless of whether you've combined it
with anything.  And since you usually don't get the source code, it's
awfully hard to make derived combinatoins.