I believe under the GPL, you can sell software, you just have to distribute the source, that's true.
However, the message hasn't seemingly sunk in, as there are many people who seem to be followers of stallman who get up in arms any time someone sells open source software (even if they are distributing the source.)
I picked some at random awhile back and looked into them. Every single "shame" was a commercial company that was complying with the GPL, and was distributing source code to ffmpeg. (Running it as a separate process, not mixing the code.)
This didn't matter to them. They documented constantly harassing these companies, who would try to comply with their demands (most of which were not required by the GPL) and then would give up, because the demands would just escalate.
It was kinda like software terrorism-- harassing people for selling software that included -- sometimes as a small part-- open source code.
However, the message hasn't seemingly sunk in, as there are many people who seem to be followers of stallman who get up in arms any time someone sells open source software (even if they are distributing the source.)
It is apparently offline now, but there used to be a huge list here: http://ffmpeg.org/shame.html
I picked some at random awhile back and looked into them. Every single "shame" was a commercial company that was complying with the GPL, and was distributing source code to ffmpeg. (Running it as a separate process, not mixing the code.)
This didn't matter to them. They documented constantly harassing these companies, who would try to comply with their demands (most of which were not required by the GPL) and then would give up, because the demands would just escalate.
It was kinda like software terrorism-- harassing people for selling software that included -- sometimes as a small part-- open source code.