> I can't quite understand people like you. That's because you've pretty substantially misinterpreted what I said. I don't think "developers somehow owe you c

> I can't quite understand people like you. That's because you've pretty substantially misinterpreted what I said. I don't think "developers somehow owe you code to use in a proprietary fashion" -- developers are free to place any licensing restrictions they want on their work. What I do think is that the GPL is paternalistic, communistic, and intellectually dishonest. Here's why: - Once open sourced, your code stays open sourced forever. There's no way to "un-opensource" code, and users can make use of it, forever. - If users want the source code to the tools they use, they are absolutely free to only use binaries from people that provide the source code. If they don't want the code, they don't have to. Ergo, users already have the "rights" and/or "freedoms" you're pretending to gift to them. QED. What the GPL actually does is create a quid-pro-quo communist common ownership of the means of production (code) between developers. This has nothing to do with "rights" of end-users, and everything to do with restricting the rights of developers should they choose to participate in the GPL ecosystem. There's nothing wrong with that system (other than it being unworkable and viral and restrictive, but there's no law against being obtuse), but it is intellectually dishonest to claim some sort of moral or ethical high ground. The GPL is a simple mechanism to restrict what other people do with the code they write in exchange for using your code, not about "four freedoms" or "user rights". The parallel's to Marxist Philosophy ought to be pretty obvious in the aptly titled "Why Software Should Not Have Owners" essay from RMS: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-free.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-free.html