It's not about "backing a commercial website"; it's about selling a solution for your own customers to use, where WordPress might be a component of that offered solution, customized into being something else (e.g. a control panel.)

There are concerns that doing so, in the context of a monorepo, might infect your entire codebase — including the components that have nothing to do with the control-panel, and so never touch the Wordpress stuff — with GPL.

Of course, you can architect code to get around that, e.g. building your shared architecture that the control-panel uses as a library, and then pulling that lib in from your isolated Wordpress control-panel codebase. But enterprises don't want to be forced into (possibly sub-optimal) architectures just because one component legally requires it. They'd rather just not use that component, so that their architecture can be totally determined by what's best for their development.

Sure, okay, fine.

I realize this is an ideological position (and not necessarily a popular one on this board) but that's the point of the GPL. If certain companies lose out because they're afraid to share, then they have no one to blame but themselves.

The pitch is that the world of free software can, collectively, build better software for everyone sharing, than the proprietary islands who selfishly cut themselves off from that ocean.

It's a risk assessment calculation, and usually the lawyers make that call.

At a previous company I worked at legal considered it cheaper to reinvent the wheel if necessary to avoid GPL software than to potentially have to deal with a lawsuit around GPL being used in our software.

Even LGPL software was considered off-limits, because one wrong linker flag and now it's statically linked into the resulting binary...

> Even LGPL software was considered off-limits, because one wrong linker flag and now it's statically linked into the resulting binary...

Then, to get compliance, you just have to fix the linker flag. Providing the source code is not the only way to get compliance.

I think they're suggesting that the statically-linked version of the binary might have ended up published as a release to the public Internet. At which point, it's unclear whether it's possible to "undo" the copyleft infection simply by "unpublishing" the release. People have already potentially downloaded the "infected" release.

Once you are in violation, you have two ways to fix it: stop publishing the software with the violation (and, optionally, publish a version without the violation instead) or give access to the source code. The main problem with accidental violation is that, with GPLv2, you need to have an agreement with the copyright holder to unterminate your license. With GPLv3, you have a grace period and major copyright holders (like Redhat) told they would also use a grace period for GPLv2.