Free != Free - the open source paradox a la MySql

The saga surrounding oracle's acquisition of sun and the MySql debacle has grown to send tiny self-rightous reverberations through the blogosphere - with people alternatively decrying , and decrying the decrying of the GPL.

Of the former, none more so than mysql founder Monty Widenius, whose rhetoric sounds slightly self-serving:

Monty: I'm shocked, just shocked at how Oracle could use the GPL to limit freedoms!
Accountant: Here are your monthly returns on the money you made on your sale of Mysql, whose value was dramatically boosted by the dual-licensing method you guys were a major pioneer of.
Monty: Oh, thanks.

The GPL is a restrictive license. Everyone knows it. Eveyone has known it for a long time. It's the reason why people who don't have strong idealogical or commercial interest and want to release free-er as in beer-er software don't release under the GPL. They release under the MIT or the BSD. The GPL and it's even more restrictive variant the AGPL is really only for two groups that at first glance should have nothing in common: open-source zealots (I use that terms in a positive sense) and commercial enterprises.

The reason for this odd coupling is that both groups actually have exactly the same unified goal: neither wants anyone else to be able to gain a competitive commercial advantage using their software over anyone else. For the former group the story ends there. For the later group - commercial enterprises - there's an additional part of the story: except if people pay us for that privelege and we can control it.

The freedom that the GPL provides isn't for you when you are using, modifying and distributing a piece of someone else's software - it's for everyone else, and most importantly for whoever birthed the piece of software in question into the world and retains the copyright on the existing code. It's a guarantee that you can't take their software, make a bunch of enhancements and then sit on those enhancements while the money pours in - you'll need to share those enhancements with everyone else and lose any competitive edge you have gained - or talk to the creators of the software and come to an agreement as to how to divide the pot.

So is this commercial use of the GPL somehow wrong or anti-ethical? I don't think so. I think it provides the opportunity for companies to release software that is part of their core business strategy which otherwise wouldn't have been released because of the danger of someone taking what they've done and privately monetizing additions to a free release.

Now, given that that we're releasing a AGPL'd CMS take that obviously self-interested opinion with a grain of salt, just remember that free (as in beer) != free (as in speech). You can take your free beer and sell it to anyone else you like but that impassioned speech you just heard on the evils of capitalism is technically a piece of intellectual property that you can - to a fairly liberal extent - copy and reuse but you will never actually own.  Now now license that is associated with as software product doesn't necessarily tell you the whole story - Linux under the GPL is very different then MySQL under the GPL - so free (as in speech) doesn't even always = free (as in speech). Just like everything else in the real world, free comes in shades of gray.