I see that we're heading into a discussion on the merits of the GPL (in all its various flavors). The truth is, the GPL came about mainly as a reaction to the gradual corporatizaton of software in the universities. Bit by bit, code bases that had been passed relatively freely between students and teachers became encumbered with a variety of restrictive licensing agreements. Even code that started out completely free for anyone's use would, if the people maintaining it became part of a private organization, inevitably be relicensed as a product of that organization.

Thus, folks like Richard Stallman began to try and find ways to avoid the slow strangulation of the world of "open" source code (which, for at least a little while, really did look like it might be made obsolete). This is how the GPL was born. The GPL is a licensing agreement that states that the source code must be open, but far more importantly, adds the restriction that any further modifications to the code must also fall under the GPL. This, of course, is a rather draconian restriction!

However, the GPL has also proven to be the only truly successful open source license. Sure, there are major code bases out there under other open licenses (MIT, BSD, etc.), but most of them have major corporate backing to keep the code going; if the companies involved back out (or change their mind about licensing), the previously open codebase can become closed very quickly. Only the massively restrictive GPL can give the independent coder the assurance that what he writes isn't going to disappear inside some corporate project to which he has no access; if your code is under the GPL, then everything that anybody else does with it will also be under the GPL, forever.

So no, open is not the same as free. The surprising truth, in fact, is that free software becomes closed software very quickly...