Often it's the people that refuse to compromise that make the world a better place. Do you think Martin Luther King should have compromised on his vision of racial equality?<p>Whilst the civil rights movement is obviously far more important than the free software movement, the idea that ideals should not be compromised is at the core of both. Unlike, say, the BSD license, the GPL is a license that allows for no compromise. If you want to distribute modifications, you <i>must</i> also distribute the source. It's this ideology that made the more pragmatic open-source movement possible in the first place.