Joshua Radkewrote:
> a feature of the GPL ... that restricts (my own word) the
> freedom of a distributor ... to preserve the greater freedom.
In Stallman's own words (from the preamble to the GPL):
The licenses for most software ... are designed to take away your
freedom ...
By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee
your freedom ...
To protect your rights, we need to prevent others from denying you these
rights or asking you to surrender the rights. Therefore, you have
certain responsibilities if you distribute copies of the software, or if
you modify it: responsibilities to respect the freedom of others.
source http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
(this document also outlines the 4 Freedoms)
You are free to make changes and keep them private. The responsibility
to provide source only "kicks in" when you distribute. This prevents
corporations from taking GPL code, creating a private fork with some
trivial obfuscation, and selling vastly overpriced binaries - selfishly
riding on the backs of others.
Selling *is* permitted and some companies (Red Hat, Ubuntu) have been
wildly successful. But this isn't a good business model for others
(Microsoft, Adobe) - since who would pay $$$ when you can compile the
code yourself (or download a binary from someone who can)?