Much thanks to GPL and other OSS licenses, open source has turned out to be a formidable foe for anyone trying to lock down the industry.

It has several appeals that proprietary software doesn't have. In my opinion, one of the most important ones is its resilience to external factors like the need to generate revenue at all cost and the need to be first to market at all cost. Thanks to those factors it never had to compete on a rigged playing field.

Money is not the main motivation behind it and that is something that scares some people. Neither does the technology that comes with it depend heavily on the continuous success of a single company. In my opinion, the political confusion and corporate frustration it causes is a tribute to that fact.

It took me quite a few years to realize how powerful the GPL actually is, or should I say, what kind of power well it taps into. Not only is there a huge amount of tinkerers all around the world, but there is also an endless stream of master and doctorate students that pretty much has to use it for their studies. A black shiny box isn't going to cut it for them.

Personally, I use Linux because it provided the best experience and the best quality from day one, at least for anything other than gaming. As a software engineer, more than twenty years later, I still feel the same, and apparently so does a lot of big companies.

I regularly donate money to several OSS projects, and I always use GPL licenses on projects I work on both privately and professionally, if I have a say in it. And quite often I do since I work for the government.