You are entirely correct about what the software license is supposed to be, and GPLv3 does do what it set out to do. I however believe that it is a bad choice, along with Linus and the vast majority of the kernel developers (they took a poll). I believe as they do that it would be bad for business. I also have come down repeatedly in the Open Source camp as opposed to the Free Software camp. The FSF represents an ideological stance that is great in theory but in the real world falls flat. The perfect example of that is when Richard Stallman said it would be better for Bryan Lunduke’s children to starve rather than for Bryan to write proprietary software. The FSF is just as much a trampler of my choices and rights as MS or Apple.

Any software license is about specifying rights, and the key is to understand just whose rights are being protected. In software (as in so many things), the dividing line is between the rights of end users and the rights of software companies. The GPL was designed to push this in the direction of protecting the rights of the user to the maximum extent feasible. GPL v3 was a response to companies finding a way to use GPL’d software while removing end user’s rights, and plugged the hole that had been revealed. In that, it is quite successful, and many projects are using GPL v3. I recently read an interview with Michael Meeks regarding the Libre Office project, and he attributed the huge increase in activity and energy over OpenOffice.org the the adoption of the GPL v3. It would appear that a lot of developers are motivated to doing their best work by knowing that it will remain forever free.

Open source is a different thing, and has different aims. It was developed mainly by Bruce Perens and Eric Raymond to promote the use of open source software by companies. Other then the source code being freely available, it does not particularly try to protect user’s rights, or even the rights of developers. In the push to commercialize this software, they have promoted such “innovations” as copyright assignment, dual licensing, and “open-core”. To people in this camp, GPL v3 is called a “restrictive” license, but you have to be clear that this means the license restricts the ability of companies to take away rights from the end user. And where this leads is to cases where software that is not subject to restrictive licensing gets taken over by companies and locked down. A prime example of this is the Apple OsX. This was based on software licensed under the extremely non-restrictive BSD license. Apple said “thank you very much”, and turned it into the most closed and restrictive platform in existence.