&gt; the spirit of open source software is, to make the software used and to encourage sharing of the source between developers.<p>This is why many of us feel it is important to support <i>Free Software</i> instead of <i>Open Source Software</i>. Freedom - and preserving a free development environment for General Purpose Computers - is a far more important goal.<p>&gt; GPL basically ensures that most developers of commercial software have to stay away from it<p>That&#x27;s not the GPL&#x27;s fault, proven by the fact that there are commercial software companies that sell GPL software.<p>There are reasons to not use GPL, but you don&#x27;t want to follow the community&#x27;s rules, you don&#x27;t get to steal their work. Nothing is free; either pay the price the community sets (follow the GPL), or negotiate another license from the authors.<p>&gt; very large companies prefer the open source approach<p>Yes, they prefer being able to take code for free without any ethical obligation to give back, a very narcissistic attitude. This meme that the GPL is &quot;bad&quot; or &quot;less-free&quot; is just a cheap excuse to try to get free code.<p>&gt; exclude them from any non-open use<p>They only have to open the code associated with someone else&#x27;s GPL code they are using. Depending on what you&#x27;re writing, this code can be isolated so you only need to open the source to that particular program. If you&#x27;re linking to an LGPL library, it&#x27;s even easier.