Olof Hedman: If that counts as a political agenda, by that reasoning most licences (including proprietary) have a political agenda...
The origin of GNU and GPL is a strong belief that all software, as all human ideas, should be open source, and that it should be illegal to hold out on the source code to anything. (including patents, etc)
And it was designed to promote that belief. (a big reason for the "viral" part)
Nothing wrong with that, I think it's a beautiful idea, and it has a lot of merit.
But it's good to know when you choose what license to use, and its far from just "it's free".
GPL is actually pretty complicated, thats why they had to design LGPL to loosen up on the "political"part.
I agree there are politics behind the GPL. Most licences are inherently "viral", including what the OP is after (if I wanted to distribute his tool in my package, I could no distribute commerciall) - you have to abide by the terms, which can apply to the whole - yes, the idea is to use the same rules of copyright, to trying to preserve freedom for users.
