GPL, BSD, Opensource/Free Software movement.

I've be a mindless supporter of these movements for years now not because I was a developer myself but because most of them provided me with a lot of useful free software.

However now that I'm becoming more of a programmer I'm questioning the ideology behind these movements.

1. For which situations are these intended? For every developer?
2. Doesn't it go against the developer himself? How can he secure profit while still sustain such projects?

Just willing to learn.
Thanks.

>>4
You misunderstand GPL and especially BSD.

Since you retain copyright, you can relicense or dual license it.
GPL is communistic in the sense that people have to provide the changes to you, while BSD doesn't require anything but recognition. Anyone is free to use BSD in both free and commercial closed-source works.

I like BSD/MIT/WTFPL/public domain/... because they force the least things on me. GPL is useful, but it's much more selfish in my opinion, so I'll avoid using any GPL'ed code in my applications, even if I may open source them (usually as public domain or do-whatever-the-fuck-you-want, since I don't like restricting people, just like I don't like being restricted myself). LGPL and LLGPL are also useful and can be used in libraries as they don't force too many things on you, and you only have to distribute the libraries' code if modified (LLGPL allows static linking as well, unlike LGPL which is fuzzy in this area).

If you want to make money of yours or other people's GPL (or other open source software), you can provide support or sell commercial licenses, the latter only if you agree with what it entails(someone who prefers GPL over BSD might not).

Besides, you can do software as a service, internal software development and many other things. In my opinion people paying a coder for their work is better than people paying the coder for a "product" (which costs nothing to duplicate).