Not exactly. The copyright owner can sell it for any price they want and
doesn't have to give their code away in any way. They can also sell it
as a binary+source. Their pick, full power to the original author.
Now the moment that somebody else gets the code they can either:
- sell it on in giving away source+binary
- give it away to everybody they want
What the non-copyright owner can't do though is share the binaries with
others. When one shares the binary one also has to share the source and
all the changes made. As long as the non-copyright owner keeps the
source and keeps the binary they don't have to distribute either. The
moment they sell/pass it on though, eg a linksys box, they must give it
away.
This portion limits "commercial usage" as anybody who wants to extend it
to make it do what they want, taking just a simple basis and adding a
load of options to it, they still have to provide also the source when
they pass on the binary to the third party.
For me that is unacceptable. I either give my code away for everybody to
peruse or I keep it locked up in a closet.
GPL is good though if you want to force people to give back the code to
you so that you can use it in your own dual-licensed projects.
For people wanting true freedom of their code use: BSD or ISC it ;)
Tip for coders: Start a lousy little project that many people will like,
then release it as GPL, then if lucky people will use it and give you
patches, now you can sell it back to them ;) Okay, that stops at the
moment you have other people's code in there which you can't
dual-license though, and that is the fun of GPL: you cripple yourself.
That is simply dual-licensing, something different altogether ;)
See above for a nasty trick there though.
Greets,
Jeroen
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