It's amazing to me that free software is still strong after all of these years. I can remember back in the early 90s being fed propaganda from my college professors about "the communist" Stallman and his friends. They had made plenty of enemies back then and countless more since. Yet, they kept to their principles and moved things forward to the benefit of billions of people.

They made enemies, because oh so many wanted to bootstrap from academia into business by putting proprietary wrappers around freely shared code.

But the GPL basically forbids that.

Nevermind the fact that most researchers hardly ever publish their source code, and often when they do it won't build on anyone else's machines.