Notices

The GPL is about sharing what the authors want to be shared. It does not in any way encourage or legitimise the use of pirated code. As the SCO case showed, GPL people take copyright and attribution more seriously than most closed software manufacturers.

It's not quite that straightforward. The free software movement is founded on a belief that software should be free, not that it should be free if authors want it to be. The GPL is a clever legal hack to encourage this to be increasingly the case whilst working within the law as it exists. The author(s) of the GPL would be quite happy if software freedom was mandated by law for all software and the GPL became redundant.

Here's something about the Free Software Foundations stand on sharing:

On the other hand, here's an explanation of how the abolishment of copyright would hurt Free software.

The idea is sound, but on the ecosystem level, it can be dangerous. With an all-proprietary/commercial solution, this is not a problem - a helathy profit margin is everybody's interest. Here, however, the table turns. Free software doesn't care about other people's profit margin. Make higher quality apps, you say ? It's not that easy - resources (time and money) are limited and there is no inherent guarantee that a classic-model oriented developer will be able to keep up with a successful large OSS projects that has hundreds of contributors. In those terms, the higher pressure on commercial developers is a double edged sword with regard to the end users - you might get higher quality apps, but at the same time that might be the cause why a commercial project folds.

Man, that slippery slope just shows up everywhere...