[pluma]

It's not about end-user freedom at all. The GPL is there to establish the freedom of the code itself.

For the end-user it's irrelevant what license a product uses. They buy a polished, boxed product; they don't download source code, set up the code's build requirements and then compile it.

The only practical benefit of open source products for the end-user is that there may be forks of it which could have an impact on the price (although a product is more than just its source code, so they may not even be interchangeable). Or that someone could pick it up if the original developer abandons it. But these are theoretical long-term benefits, not immediate ones like those for developers or the code itself.

I'm not saying the GPL is bad. Just that people often misunderstand its motives. The GPL is about code in the same way PeTA is about animals. If the humans benefit directly from it, that's great, but the primary motivation is an ethical absolute: code should be free, locking it behind proprietary licenses is against its nature.

[camgunz]

The GPL exists to ensure that code remains easily attainable and modifiable. These are huge end-user benefits.

GPL and BSD/MIT-style licenses are not equivalent in this regard, because code under BSD/MIT-style licenses is not obligated to be either easily attainable or modifiable. You can ship binaries and not release source code.

You can profit from GPL code. MySQL is perhaps the best example but there are others.

Keeping the source open is a big deal, because communities and projects can die otherwise. More than a few game mods, for example, have died because the developers closed the source to mitigate cheating, and then stopped developing the game altogether. Under the GPL, this could never happen.

[icebraining]

I disagree. You're thinking of the end-user as unsophisticated, who treats the software as a black box, but I'd argue that the philosophy behind the GPL includes the end-user as someone who potentially wants to change the tools he works with.

This separation between "developer" and "end-user" is common, but by no means absolute; there are many examples of non-professional developers adjusting their own tools such as scientists, business analysts, financial advisers, etc.

Besides, the GPL also grants the right to share the binaries with other people, which is definitively something that every end-user does.

[tspiteri]

The free software philosophy is about giving freedom to people to modify and share code. Code is not a person, it does not need to be free or to be treated ethically for its own sake. The GPL is in no way like PETA.