> One really could make the argument that his views are very similar to > DRM, which I imagine most of us agree are bad. You can use these 1's > and 0's, but only if you do so in exactly the way that I tell you you > can.... Wrong. The GPL in no way restricts your use of the software. Never has, never will. The only conditions it imposes are are *distribution*. And if you don't like it, write your own. -p. And that's exactly why most programmers (employed by companies) don't use GPL software in their software. Its too restrictive. > One really could make the argument that his views are very similar to > DRM, which I imagine most of us agree are bad. You can use these 1's > and 0's, but only if you do so in exactly the way that I tell you you > can.... While I do see the similarity you state, copyleft and DRM have no equivalency. DRM's purpose is restricting the user's ability to use software. Copyleft implies no such restriction. Well, distribution is kinda the point if you are working on other opensource software. In past jobs, I have written a lot of software that was opensource. Our goal was for everyone to be able to use our software, individuals and companies. The restrictions introduced by GPL mean that we could not use any GPL software - because our software was required to be more free than GPL allows. Otherwise, there was no point. If companies couldn't use it, we were done. Apache and Eclipse don't allow GPL licensed code contributions, because its not free enough. The restrictions are silly. Why would you want to cut your software off from 90% of your potential users? Sure, there are arguments that they might release their own product based on it... but, that doesn't seem to happen in practice. Certainly doesn't seem to be hurting Apache and Eclipse, among others.... In reality, you end up getting patches and bug fixes from a much wider audience with a license that allows more folks that a few PhD students to use your software because it doesn't impose a bunch of pie-in-the-sky make-the-world-a-better-place restrictions. In my current job, our non-opensource software is built on top of Tomcat. For this reason, I have found, documented and fixed bugs in Tomcat and related software on company time, and released all of them back into Tomcat. If Tomcat were under GPL, we wouldn't be using Tomcat. Simple as that.