timskinner

I block ads, even for sites that I like. For sites that I like which choose to give me the opportunity, I'm happy to pay a monthly or yearly fee in exchange for the ability to disable ads- for sites that don't offer that option (or where I don't feel that I derive enough value from the site to justify the minimum cost) then I assume the organization running the site has evaluated the costs and potential revenue and decided that subsidizing users who choose to not to view ads with the revenue generated by ad-viewers is preferable to setting up a system to allow me to pay for ad-free content. If I'm unable to view a site without ads, then I will simply not view that site.

I apply this philosophy to all parts of my life. I'm happy to pay for a television show on Amazon, or subscribe to netflix, because I am able to watch the shows without commercials. For shows that were not available this way, I used to use hulu because adblock plus would block the advertisements. Recently adblock plus no longer blocks the ads on hulu (this is probably a filter list mis-configuration on my part) so I stopped watching those shows altogether.

There is a great deal of content that I enjoy, and I like to see content creators get reimbursed for what they produce, but there's no content IMHO that is worth subjecting myself to the psychological manipulation of ads.

Unfortunately Amazon's DRM requires HAL, which is deprecated and has been removed from most modern distributions.

(Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, just a free software enthusiast)

> As long as the upstream is attributed, does the GPL3 explicitly prohibit this? If people are not displaying the GPL licence and attribution, that is obviously a violation, but this doesn't necessarily mean that.

The GPL doesn't require attribution, merely that you comply with the terms of the GPL, in terms of making sure that any derived works are covered under the GPL. In fact, the GPL is incompatible with some versions of the BSD license because they require attribution. It's quite sensible to rename a project if you fork it so as to not violate the original developers trademark on the name (e.g. debian referring to their build of Firefox as Iceweasel)

> I don't know enough about the GPL to know if you can "sell" GPL software (with sources and attribution, of course, which these might have)

The GPL has no prohibitions against selling software covered under the GPL, as long as the software is licensed under the GPL and the source is made available. If selling GPL software were a violation of the terms of the GPL then companies like Redhat and Oracle could not sell their commercial distributions of Linux. This is why the FSF is careful to use the term "proprietary software" instead of "commercial software", since there is nothing in the GPL to prevent the software from being commercialized as long as it complies with the license.