The main thing you're granting in choosing a permissive license is the right to deny others the right to enjoy future improvements to the code.
This is why in practice permissively licensed code is more successful in industry. Industries like to exercise the right to make proprietary improvements to open source code.
Can you give me some detail about how/when this happens? I was under the impression that you can sell support(or other ancillary services) for GPL'd code, but not for the code itself.
Of course, today you're probably not going to have a lot of luck selling something that your potential customer can just download from elsewhere for free. So, in practice, you're going to have to provide other services/benefits that go into a commercial product.
But there's nothing in the GPL that prohibits you from just selling a bunch of bits subject to the requirements of the license and calling it a day.
The FSF started out selling copies of tapes with Emacs on them, and then later whole CD collections of free software, including a mixture of GPL and non-GPL code. They even had a service for a number of years where for $5000 they would compile up a whole ton of software for whatever platform you were using, and send it to your business with t-shirts and manuals for the software.
In the past, when the internet was slower and fewer people had access to it, it made more sense to sell CDs of GPL'd code.
Theoretically you can give away a copy of the code. In practice, people don't.
(Usually includd assets, i.e. images, are kept proprietary, and the thing is sold as an aggregation.)
The thing they're really selling is security updates and maintenance.
Why is that a “right”?