Interesting discussion. What this boils down to is that many of us producing open source software would prefer it if rich corporations (especially) that depend on it paid us (the developers) for the resources we have put into development. To get this to happen these users need to be incentivised/forced to pay -- being businesses it is practically their duty if, given an option to use something for free, they will take that option. In my gut I agree with Alessandro that there seems something a bit distasteful about the GPL, But looked at from a business perspective is it really such a "trick"? The proposition seems quite straightforward to me: for organisations that wish to distribute functionality a fee is required to rid themselves of the toxic implications of the GPL. For "normal" users who just wish to use the software, this is not a problem, and for the freedom brigade who are happy to redistribute GPL'd derivates this is again, no problem. So in this way the GPL is a crude (but effective) means of enforcing a kind of differential pricing policy. As a company, we're coming at this from an opposite direction - turning a product family using traditional fee-paying licence into a product family which is FOSS. We're going to use the AGPL as the FOSS licence for just this reason. In our judgement, corporations which wish to distribute functionality/products based on our software should (continue to) pay. At the same time we are hoping the legitimate free use of the software will drive adoption. Still, there is no firm answer how best to monetize (ugh) FOSS. Part of me thinks FOSS itself was (/is) its own kind of bubble ... - Alex.