I cite this site. If you still don't believe me, wait around for the next GPL licensing fight to break out on HN and you'll see plenty of people calling it "viral" and insisting everyone should go with BSD or equivalent and if you don't it's not truly "open source".

It's such a common argument at this point that I would disagree that it's a "citation needed".

My tale is a little bit different.

I wrote an open-source library for a popular service in a popular programming language. I wrote a couple of e-mails and suddenly my library became popular.

Today it has had about 50 different people work on everything from off-by-ones to upgrading to the next language version.

This library has been a reason to employ me, so the monetary benefits are there.

I don't expect somebody to pay for something that I put out for free, I don't expect anybody to help me make that something better either. However, the time I've put into this project is worth a thousand times less to me than the standing and respect I gained, and the people I got to interact with so far.

This article is drivel from beginning to end.

It even misses the main story -- that the OpenSSL license has a peculiar advertizing clause that causes all sorts of integration problems with other projects.

I don't know that it's growing, either. I think the distribution of people making the anti-GPL argument is just super fat amongst decisionmakers and influencers in businesses.

I post all kinds of controversial things on Twitter. I _never_ receive as much pure hatred as when I talk about my preference for a viral license.