I remember once reading about the mirror way of thinking. The basic idea of the miror is that many complaints or rationlizing from one party to another should be examined in the other direction. I’ve read many things that critize payfor software for borrowing things in the public domain without giving back, and then today I realized that the thing I dislike the most about the GPL is that so much of it is copying from the public domain (and payfor domain) without giving anything back. I once wrote a little app for beos. I released it with the GPL because I had used a header of id3 genre name to id mappings from a GPL’d piece of source code, had I not done that I would have released it into the public domain. So what if some company picked up my source and made a better product with it? Software would have improved, and my life as a user would have improved.