@drewdevault I believe one point that you missed is that the licenses in the GPL family are crafted to contain no restrictions, rather only *permissions*.

The government says you may not share, modify or understand the software etc, but the GPLv3 says you *can*, just as long as you don't *restrict* these freedoms for other people.

I wouldn't call these terms obligations, as you aren't required to take any action at all - just to not carry out restrictive actions.