> If he had his way, there would be no restaurants unless they all provided recipes I'd suggest you read more of his work -- The Right To Read springs to mind

> If he had his way, there would be no restaurants unless they all provided recipes I'd suggest you read more of his work -- The Right To Read springs to mind -- as that's a misrepresentation of his ideology. His fight is for the right to open the hood of your car and decide yourself if you've got the right carburettor and maybe swap out a lug nut or two using standard dimensions, conventions, and tools. To match your example: he wouldn't eat at a restaurant that somehow made it impossible to open up your burger and see if the onions are caramelised, and required you only use McRestaurant brand utensils to eat the food. Do you own the food? Is it yours? Are you free to take parts out and add parts if you want? Or do you not have "the right" to decide that the pickles look sketchy? Recipes, in your analogy, would represent academic knowledge. I'm pretty sure he's for sharing that, too, but the GPL has no requirements that people understand how you're creating the tasty algorithms you're serving on those floppy disks... That doesn't get commoditised, as such, but instead gains new value propositions as the demand for it raises through developing an economic ecosystem surrounding it. That is to say: RedHat is more valuable because I can "commoditise" their drivers and then pay them money to scratch my itch, not less. Most businesses are in the "make money" business elsewhere, not in the Linux business. Sharing is profit.