&gt; That&#x27;s not the GPL&#x27;s fault, proven by the fact that there are commercial software companies that sell GPL software.<p>You cannot &quot;sell&quot; GPL software. You can provide it as a service (one time fee, the customer can reuse it without additional payments) or just charge service fees. But for most commercial software the development costs can be financed only if you have the traditional selling model, it would not exist otherwise.<p>&gt; 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>No one talked about stealing. I very careful observe the license of any software I touch - this is exactly the reason GPL makes me sad. I can&#x27;t touch it, I have to treat the software as if it not existed. With the software I can use, I often can enhance it on paid time and donate back, but there is just no way of doing so with GPL software.<p>&gt; 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>You got it exactly backwards. Developers at companies are very aware of the ethical obligation to give back and usually are able to do so - LGPL is mostly fine for this reason. But GPL requires them to open source something else too, and that is where the conflict arrives. The GPL license does not only involve the software it is on, but it also tries to affect others people software.<p>I think every developer has the freedom to choose any license she or he wants and the license should be observed. I have seen good software pass away, because the developer was not willing to share it at all, and there is good software which does not get used, because the license terms prevent it. So I can only hope every developer chooses the license carefully, and as discussed GPL basically excludes the software from commercial environments. If thats what the author wants, fine. But it needs to be considered.