Policy Objectives
Traditional software licenses serve business needs. Their objective is usually to maximize profit from licensing of the software. The GPL has an entirely different policy objective. It seeks to maximize the amount of free software available in the public commons.
The authors of the GPL point out that placing software into the public commons under an academic open source license doesn't always serve that important purpose. Any licensee under an academic open source license can take that free software, create derivative works from it, and then distribute those derivative works under a proprietary license. The resulting software is not free. The Free Software Foundation politely characterizes these licensees as “uncooperative people.” ...
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