am i reading this wrong?

"In addition to the GNU General Public License v2 licensing terms, we explicitly grand [sic] you the permission to run any application on top of Passenger, regardless of the application's own licensing terms. The application will not be bound to the terms of the GPL in any way. That is, the GPL only applies to Passenger itself, and not to applications that are run through Passenger."

Sounds like they are just clarifying an aspect of GPL that comes up frequently in FAQ. People wouldn't be distributing Passenger code with their application. They're just using it, like many developers use Linux but don't have applications on Linux bound by Linux's GPL license.

Err... no, I typed too quickly. Still, I really don't see the point of GPL'ing it under version two with that clause unless they think that it will mean hosting providers have to feed their changes back...

Well, that's kind of the whole point David... and yes, we do think that.

Kind regards, Hongli Lai Ninh Bui Phusion.nl

Perhaps something like the Affero GPL would have been more appropriate in that case? Maybe you have access to better legal advice than I do, but my reading of the GPL is that if you're not redistributing it, you're not required to give back your modifications, and I'm not sure that running mod_rails on your own servers counts as redistribution. Perhaps you're simply aiming to stop people from selling binary-only versions, but that doesn't seem like nearly as likely a scenario as some hosting provider boasting of a mod_rails with extra secret sauce that they're not sharing.

I'm not a license zealot, and think they all have their places, but I should also say a word or two in favor of the BSD/Apache style licenses: in the Apache Software Foundation, we don't rely on licenses to "keep people in line" (in terms of proprietary forks), but a strong, diverse community that has the potential to outdevelop anyone who tries to make a proprietary fork. They realize that if they fork, they're going to fall behind the community driven version, which is moving faster. Of course, that's not possible in all cases, but I think that a potentially important project like mod_rails certainly has a good shot at attracting that kind of community. You guys probably know more about the people in the rails hosting market than I do though, so maybe your fears are based on a concrete threat.