" It also represents an unsustainable economic idea: give something away free so that somebody else can make a buck on it. The problem is that development and maintenance of open source code involve real costs. The Open Source model assumes that those costs will always be absorbed by good-hearted programmers, for free to everybody else. Over time, however, the desire for stability within a company's code base, coupled with divergence from Open Source as companies modify Open Source for their own needs, ends up killing the model. Eventually, somebody simply grabs the Open Source, locks it down as a baseline, and starts selling their own modifications to all comers."
The point of the patent system was to allow inventors limited exclusive use of their invention to encourage innovation but then to open it to the public to improve on it. If you stymie opening the info infinitely through perversions of the patent laws intended by the Founders, you are stopping humanity from building upon prior generations' works.
At some point innovation has to be open to be improved upon. I don't understand the visceral reaction some here have to the whole idea of open source, as if it will bring the walls of capitalism tumbling down. Voluntary charity hasn't screwed the planet yet, to my knowledge.
Simple, the "father" of free software and primary open source license, Stallman, claims his "ultimate goal" is to wipe proprietary software off the earth. Add to that his radical supporters who constantly twist the truth like we see on this very thread, and some serious questions and opposition naturally emerge.