Lambda the Ultimate

What's your take on the GPL and GPL'd source code and how it affects the way businesses write code and make money from their intellectual investment?

I've read the comment that the GPL is considered by some to be 'boobytrapped', can anybody please explain this stance?

Ehud, theoretically on vacation, emailed me a link to an article from the June ACM Queue, Syntactic Heroin:

User-defined overloading is a syntactic drug that has seduced all too many language designers, programmers, and project managers.

It's focused on overloading in C++, and in particular the problems that can arise with implicit conversions, both built-in and programmer-defined. The author concludes that this is all a very bad idea, although to my disappointment, he doesn't explore more disciplined approaches to "overloading" in languages that are less conversion-happy, such as parameterized higher-order modules in functional languages, or Haskell's typeclasses.

Well, since language popularity seems to be overly emphasized in any discussion on PL, thought the following article on Have scripting languages peaked? would be of interest.

A recent study from Evans Data Corp... The study, published on Thursday, found that the number of people using PHP for development in Europe, Middle East and Africa fell by over 25% last year and that the number of developers who would not evaluate PHP for future product grew by almost 40 percent. Similarly, Perl and Python also saw significant drop-offs in usage and planned usage.