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No, this is not why the GPL was created. Richard Stallman has said repeatedly that he is fine with companies making money out of other people's GPLd software. T

• schoen 12y ago
  That's quite right, although the "doormat" sentiment is also true: https://www.gnu.org/events/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.html https://www.gnu.org/events/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.html "But the other issue I was thinking about was, I wanted to give the community a feeling that it was not a doormat, a feeling that it was not prey to any parasite who would wander along. If you don't use copyleft, you are essentially saying: [speaking meekly] “Take my code. Do what you want. I don't say no.” So, anybody can come along and say: [speaking very firmly] “Ah, I want to make a non-free version of this. I'll just take it.” And, then, of course, they probably make some improvements, those non-free versions might appeal to users, and replace the free versions. And then, what have you accomplished? You've only made a donation to some proprietary software project." RMS felt that what would make him a "doormat" was if his code ended up in a proprietary program, not if someone made money from it.