[eesmith]

> offering it for free to the whole world, definitionally

That's definitionally not true. Quoting https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html

] if you are redistributing copies of free software, you might as well charge a substantial fee and make some money. Redistributing free software is a good and legitimate activity; if you do it, you might as well make a profit from it. ...

] Except for one special situation, the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL) has no requirements about how much you can charge for distributing a copy of free software. You can charge nothing, a penny, a dollar, or a billion dollars. It's up to you, and the marketplace, ...

That's why the linked-to essays says "Technically, the GPL allows [a paywall]" from the text.