I find this to be yet another example of why the GPL (in general) was created, and why licenses like or similar to the BSD license are flawed.
The way I see the GPL is that by modifying and publicly releasing the modified version of the binary, the payment for being able to do that is paid, at a minimum, in the code that should be released to accompany those changes.
You want to use my code, and not pay me for it with money? Then pay me (or pay it forward) with the code instead.
The BSD license and other similar licenses, while seemingly more free - really aren't. They allow for someone or some company to just come in, take the code, then profit off of it in a closed-source manner - provided they give some acknowledgement somewhere that it came from the original BSD based project or whatnot.
Now - granted - in neither case would the programmer get paid money - but in the case of the GPL, at the very least the changes, fixes, updates, whatever - get "paid for" in code. It won't put food on the table, but it is the least that someone could do, imho, by benefitting from the rest of the codebase.
I note that the above is a very simplified understanding of the GPL, BSD, etc - and of this issue in general. But I still think the basic idea stands; that at its core, the GPL is about "paying for" code with code, so that code nor changes to it will ever "go missing" or become "locked up" into some proprietary version of the code, and ultimately benefiting users less (whether they know or understand it or not).
I honestly didn’t see the need for GPL until a project I had sunk a lot of time into contributing to changed their license from Apache to Proprietary and started charging more than I could possibly afford for a license.
I feel tricked and betrayed, it has been a year and I am still upset. The whole thing feels like I got robbed. I donated my time to a project I thought was for the good of the community, turns out I was just doing free work on a proprietary product others stood to make money on.
It’ll be a long time before I sign another CLA on something I care about.
On the flip of this, if it were GPL it likely wouldn't have seen the adoption by commercial companies that it has had. Barring whatever signing key they are talking about, nothing is in principle barring people from forking this and continuing it as open source.
No code has "gone missing" or has become "locked up." You simply don't have access to the new code he's written, and why should you? Frankly, if this were GPL the result would have likely been that he simply stopped working on it. You still wouldn't have gotten any code you think you deserve, and you also wouldn't have the current commercial option.
This example just highlights to me why I prefer licenses like the BSD license.
The way I see the GPL is that by modifying and publicly releasing the modified version of the binary, the payment for being able to do that is paid, at a minimum, in the code that should be released to accompany those changes.
You want to use my code, and not pay me for it with money? Then pay me (or pay it forward) with the code instead.
The BSD license and other similar licenses, while seemingly more free - really aren't. They allow for someone or some company to just come in, take the code, then profit off of it in a closed-source manner - provided they give some acknowledgement somewhere that it came from the original BSD based project or whatnot.
Now - granted - in neither case would the programmer get paid money - but in the case of the GPL, at the very least the changes, fixes, updates, whatever - get "paid for" in code. It won't put food on the table, but it is the least that someone could do, imho, by benefitting from the rest of the codebase.
I note that the above is a very simplified understanding of the GPL, BSD, etc - and of this issue in general. But I still think the basic idea stands; that at its core, the GPL is about "paying for" code with code, so that code nor changes to it will ever "go missing" or become "locked up" into some proprietary version of the code, and ultimately benefiting users less (whether they know or understand it or not).