Ethics and rights

There is more than one approach to creating, licensing, and distributing software. For instance, the free software or the open source community produces software under licensing that makes it free for inspection of its code, modification of its code, and distribution. While the software released under an open source license (such as General Public License, or GPL for short) can be sold for money,[6] the distribution cannot be restricted in the same way as software with copyright and patent restrictions (used by corporations to require licensing fees).
While some advocates of free software use slogans such as "information wants to be free," hinting that it is easy to copy digital data and that the licenses (enforced through laws) are unnatural restrictions, other creators and users of open source software recognize it to be one model among many for software creation, licensing, and distribution. And the laws themselves are put into place for the ostensible purpose of increasing creative output, by allowing the creators to control and profit most effectively from their intellectual property.