They're silly, folks. Intellectual property is a spook.

Under communism all software will be free to share, use, and modify without restriction.

This post inspired by the current Ruby mimemagic gem license drama.

In case you're not following:

• mimemagic is a Ruby library (gem) used for detecting the MIME types of files, either by their extension or by their content
• it's widely used and included in Rails
• it was MIT licensed
• it was using an xml file from freedesktop dot org, which is a GPL project
• the GPL license means that every project that uses that software must also be GPL licensed - open-source, freely usable/modifiable/etc
• someone from freedesktop pointed this out to the mimemagic maintainer
• the maintainer republished the gem as GPL and yanked all the MIT licensed gems, breaking builds everywhere, and making rails currently uninstallable

I have a big headache because of ideology.