You plainly do not see use of the source code as a feature that users - business users - might want. Advantage over competition is being cut right out of this, it WILL make GPLed software less attractive to business.

I'm pretty sure that everybody here understands that the right to use source code in any way they want is something that buisness want. What the rest of us feel is that the price of that is higher then the benefit.

The function of the GPL is to encourage the free sharing of code, by making code available to you at the price of making your changes to that code available to others. The Web Services loophole lets companies get around that. That loophole makes it more desirable to buisness at the expense of making it less desirable to the people that back the GPL.

Jay