Took me a bit to understand it, but after that I changed from OpenOffice to LibreOfficeĪll in all, it might not be perfect, but it's better than the recipe metaphor Stallman used: imagine someone gave you a recipe for a great dish, but you can't enhance it and pass it to your neighbour because you must sign an agreement so the recipe is licensed to you and even forbids you to alter it in any way. GPL'ed software has ended even in hardware sold by big companies, and when they got into trouble was for not crediting the original software and at least pointing to where to obtain the source.Īlso, not all open source software is free software, it's a matter of philosophy, but that's more technical. Hence why some people use the word Libre instead of Free for this kind of software, to not confuse with the gratis meaning of the word free (the most misused word in internet, probably). You can't do that with someone's propietary software (with few exceptions) even if the source is available. Nothing in the GPL forbids you to create commercial software it forbids you to not make it GPL compliant as well.
GPL allows selling source code and binaries (as long as source code is distributed with the binaries), original or modified.
free (free as in gratis), but about free (as in freedom) vs. It's not about a business model, commercial vs.