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The GPL in this case doesn't have anything to do with it. If you're familiar/have seen the XOOPS code and then go write something with similar functionality, you could be open to accusations of apropriating code (really, it's hard NOT to do in some cases). This is an issue with any license (unless the code in quesiton is under an open source license and you're relesing your own code compatible license terms)

That's why you have the "clean room" aproach when companies reverse engineer. They have one team disassemble and work out the protocol/product. Document it fully (without code) and pass it into a second team to implement.

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A re-implementation is safe, although you'll need to make sure all the libraries you use are non-GPL (LGPL is fine). Although if you've seen the XOOPS code I guess you may be considered "contaminated".

As for the PhpNuke, there's probably still some shared code somewhere (text sanitiser?). Anything the core group wrote is their own, but if it's a derivitave work of PHPNuke they need to abide by their licensing (GPL? BSD? Never looked at nuke, so couldn't say). That's not to say it's not possible to relicense, but the relicensing must be compatible with the old license. For example I believe it's possible to relicense BSD code as GPL (?) but not the other way round.

I guess what I meant is since RedHat is out for you, is there any particular reason you immediately discounted other Linux distributions (free ones)? :)

Also the limitation is you can't distribute MySQL with a commercial product. There is nothing stopping you from distributing instructions for downloading MySQL, or possibly even an installation script that downloads/installs MySQL (bit less certain about that) with a commercial product. You just can't ship the two together. So in practice it's not a huge barrier.

Further the "commercial application" limitation is in reality a "non GPL compatible license" limitation. If your application in question is GPL (eg Xoops) then all your problems go away anyway, since any XOOPS derived code must be GPL as well.

Just trying to be helpful

Any particular reason you're set on RedHat for Linux? There are a lot of other well supported distributions.

Here we run various combinations of stable/testing/unstable Debian, which is very nice to manage and maintain. I hear Knoppix is a good choice if the Debian install scares you a bit or you want a bit more "pretty".

As for Postgres... At the risk of starting a flamewar, I personally find Postgres a pain to admin compared to MySQL, and for the type of applications I see people using it (I work at a webhost) the advantages it does have never come into play.