There's no such thing as a free (software) lunch Jay Michaelson,
Wasabi Systems What every developer should know about open
source licensing “The licenses for most software are designed to
take away your freedom to share and change it. By contrast, the
GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom
to share and change free software to make sure the software is
free for all its users.”1 So begins the GNU General Public
License, or GPL, which has become the most widely used of open
source software licenses. Freedom is the watchword—it’s no
coincidence that the organization that wrote the GPL is called
the Free Software Foundation—and that open source developers
everywhere proclaim, “Information wants to be free.” As the GPL
indicates two paragraphs later, however, “To protect your
rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid anyone to deny
you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights.”2 As
most open source software developers know, this means that, in
practice, the GPL is actuall