I don&#x27;t understand this - every product &amp; service sold in the open market - from baby formula to clothing, from a meal at a restaurant to a flight - relies on competitive advantage that&#x27;s proprietary to the seller.<p>A mindset to open this advantage up is somehow being selectively applied to software.<p>In a truly open and free market, malicious elements that include spyware, rootkits .. etc will get rooted out. Additionally, regulation from the justice department and FTC tries to maintain the free-ness of the market, so that one company doesn&#x27;t abuse its position.<p>In this light, the GPL is simply not compatible with the tenets of economics - which by the way is how evolution and biology has programmed all of us.<p>BSD&#x2F;Apache&#x2F;MIT kind of permissive licenses offer true freedom. They allow for jointly harnessing the resources of many to build infrastructure that has widespread use - an approach that allows companies to focus on their value-add rather than re-inventing the wheel.<p>Stallman is a vocal detractor [1] of ANY permissive open-source license. This is unfortunate for someone who actually played  a pivotal role in the big success that open-source is today.<p>[1]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.slashdot.org&#x2F;story&#x2F;15&#x2F;02&#x2F;08&#x2F;210241&#x2F;rms-objects-to-support-for-llvms-debugger-in-gnu-emacss-gudel" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.slashdot.org&#x2F;story&#x2F;15&#x2F;02&#x2F;08&#x2F;210241&#x2F;rms-obj...</a>