"I'm not really sure what you're ranting against, but the whole point of the GPL is to force "give some, get some", and to stop people from profiting off of other people's work."
My point was that Richard Stallman for years claimed that this wasn't the reason. I also don't really think there was a problem with people "profiting off of other people's work" before the GPL became popular.
When you release something for free, it shouldn't matter if someone makes a profit from it. If you do care, then don't call it "free".
"Which community are you talking about now? The "pirate" community or the "free software" community?"
This community, for starters. Check out the lasted post about the guy from Thesis VS Wordpress. The majority of the people here on HN support Wordpress.
"Also, the FSF is of the position that copyrights suck, but that doesn't stop them from making the GPL using existing copyright law. The GPL is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Copyright law is as it is, and therefore we have the GPL as it is. If copyright law was different, for example if software couldn't be copyrighted, we wouldn't have the GPL at all."
The whole point of the GPL is so people have the freedom to tinker with the source code (this has been said by Stallman many times). If we had no copyright laws, there would be nothing stopping people from releasing binaries only. The difference would be that you could share the copyrighted works with anybody.
Would this really benefit the community?
