“I’ve written that some vendors don’t comprehend the GPL.
Groklaw member PolR wrote me an interesting email, in which he told
me that the problem isn’t that vendors don’t comprehend it. They
do. They just are not enamored. They particularly hate freedom
zero, PolR wrote, ‘the freedom to run the program for any purpose,
any way you like,’ as Richard Stallman has defined it. So some are
deliberately trying to skirt around it, egged on by Microsoft and
their mouthpieces, and joined by some in the community who don’t
much care or who care about ‘success’ or money more than they care
about end users.“He did some thinking about how to counter that pressure, and he
suggests that the answer is educating end users. *They* are the
ones that need to comprehend the freedoms that the GPL seeks to
give them, because if they do understand it–whether they are
individuals, businesses, or government entities–they are likely to
demand them and they will deliberately avoid Brand X ‘Linux’
substitutes, because they will comprehend what closed, binary blobs
will do to them…”