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.