Copyleft was conceived as a hack of the copyright system, a necessary evil because placing a work in the public domain allows other people to profit from the wo

Copyleft was conceived as a hack of the copyright system, a necessary evil because placing a work in the public domain allows other people to profit from the work. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft: As Stallman deemed it impractical in the short term to eliminate current copyright law and the wrongs he perceived it perpetuated, he decided to work within the framework of existing law; he created his own copyright license, the Emacs General Public License,[8] the first copyleft license. There is nothing that keeps an open source developer from profiting from their labor. Some are employed by a company explicitly to work on OSS, or contract with a company to implement a desired feature. In fact, an open source developer can _only_ profit from their labor, and not at all from their "capital".