Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com> writes:
Different people have different goals. People who do not share
the goals enforced by the GPL ought not to distribute their work
using it. But they should expect that people who do share the
goals of the GPL will ignore their work.
I think we should not classify all people into these two categories.
Most people have varying goals at varying times, so they can happily
coexist with many types of licenses, including the GPL.
Only on Usenet (and perhaps within Microsoft) do we find people who can
only ever criticize the GPL and pretend to never see any value in it.
These people are hypocrites, because you will find them furtively using
GPL-based products. They secretly do Google searches, even though they
know perfectly well that these searches are done on GPL'd OSes.
Microsoft, despite its pious anti-GPL claims, uses a GPL-based content
distribution system (called Akamai) to distribute its software updates.
--