GPL Isn’t a Good License for Proprietary Software

Yesterday, I wrote about the clarification regarding WordPress Themes and the GPL (v2). Daniel Jalkut, who I featured as a personal WordPress Hero earlier this year, wrote one of the most interesting responses to “[WordPress] Themes are GPL, too“. Written on Thursday and temporarily taken offline by the fireball, Daniel’s “Getting Pretty Lonely” article laments that WordPress is GPL, and that any open source software that uses a GPL license discourages developer community participation.

At first this article left me very upset, maybe because I found it quite persuasive, but then I reflected that for anyone developing and selling proprietary software, Daniel’s is the only position to believe in and promote.