> Then who's going to pay for it?
Just because you ship it to them GPL does not mean that it is publicly
accessible.
For exsample, if I have a product that I built for a customer, I would
have to give it to them under the GPL. But I also have the choice to not
give it to them AT ALL. So, they pay me to get it, and the license is the
GPL. Their other choice, if they didn't pay me, would be to not have it
at all. It's likely that I could sell this same software to multiple
entities, because the likelihood of the first company having the time,
personel, and motivation to just giving it away on the Internet are very
small.
In addition, if you make it available at stores, people will buy it for
convenience, like they do with Red Hat and Star Office.
> The reason that there is a lot of confusion is that the license
> conditions are extremely confusing.
I haven't found this to be true. Most people just don't read the license
and assume they know what it says. For a license, it's pretty
straightforward. Not as straightforward as MIT/X, but pretty
straightforward nonetheless. In fact, most of the complications come from
copyright law itself(i.e. - the definition of a derivative work), and not
the GPL.
Jon