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And thank you for commenting here. Sorry about the moderation, been having spam of late.

See... I tried to make this point on your blog... the thing is that if I take GPL'd code, someone wrote it before me. And if I modify it, I am deriving from their work as well - so if I close it off in a cul-de-sac, I'm effectively claiming the work of others as my own. We could go back and forth, but when a user downloads the binary/executable from me, they see my name and think that I did it all. I didn't, of course. So there's that.

Of course, the catch is that if you don't distribute, you don't have to share the source. In other words, if you're going to profit directly from the work of others, you have to allow others to do the same. That seems 'Fair' to me.

Freedom is subjective, I suppose. Whose freedom is more important? Yours or another person who uses the work or the people who originally created the work? I guess if you're going to modify someone else's code, and you accept their license, you should follow that license. I don't see that as 'less free'.

Like I said on your blog, we could go at this for hours so I stopped there. I understand your perspective on the 'free' bit, I just don't see it that way. I hope you see my perspective as well. Perhaps the answer is somewhere in the middle for some people.