The time has come to stand up for the GPL
I confess I've never paid much attention to GPL, and when I think about this I find one particular reason. I don't understand the harm. What bad thing happens when the GPL is not obeyed? I think I understand that the answer is that your generously donated code (Christoph's in the article) may then be taken into private hands and used to benefit a commercial company. Is that the harm? But if so, what's the harm? You donated your code, didn't you? I'm asking in all sincerity: what specific asset or benefit have you lost when someone takes your GPL code and uses it in their commercial product?The article seems to get upset about this event: "They took Christoph's code from Linux and modified it to work with their own kernel without releasing source code of the resulting complete work." So that's the harm? But how is that harmful? How does that hurt Christoph or anyone else?Perhaps the answer is: "Christoph worked so hard on it, and gave such expertise and so much time, and now his work is providing benefit to others with no further benefit to himself." I would certainly agree in general that if you work hard on something and someone else steals your work and benefits from it instead of you, then this is a clear and deplorable harm. But if you give your work away so that people benefit from it in general, then you have agreed that your sole benefit is not at issue and that you don't expect compensation for the work. If someone then uses the work for their own financial benefit, or modifies it without giving you the changes back, what has that deprived you of? Surely that's not taking away anything that would have been coming to you had they not done it. Is it?Where's the harm?