Ben Finney wrote:
b) People that think that the developer tools are fine using the GPL, because it promotes usage and adoption of free-software.
Rather, I think it's not the place of a copyright license to try to restrict the product of using the tool. It would require an over-reach of copyright that I think is quite inappropriate.
I'm not sure that is the case in general: probably in some limited aspect it may be true for specific development environments, but there are few that many people would want to use where some aspect of the development tools are not built into the final product.
As a common example, you have the GCC runtime exception, but I can think of a number of development environments for which it would be true - either with source code being directly included with software (as in GNU Bison) or significant support library requirement (Delphi, Java, .net, etc.). I would have suspicion that for scripting languages in general a very strong argument could be made; even if it were a highly pipe-reliant shell script (if it were suitably non-trivial, anyway).
So I don't think it's an over-reach of copyright particularly.
Cheers,
Alex.