> unnecessarily geeky and childish nomenclature, GPLv3
You seem to be a bit new to this issue.
Building software from source and using FLOSS licenses makes sure that the software is available in the long term and can be developed further (even if the original developers lose interest or run out of time for that).
There are many more advantages in using free (copyleft) software which can be build from source, and making this capability available to the end user as Guix does:
- better privacy protection (the software does not phone home or leaks your private data, as does, for example, Zoom)
- a working software which is used will not be simply withdrawn and be forbidden to use (as many Google software projects).
- useful standards and file formats, such as markup in text documents are available in the long term (I still have latex sources from 1993 around which I wrote in another language that uses different char sets, and which I can today compile without any problem).
- FLOSS software also has the advantage that it is more economical with attention (a very precious human resource), as it only display useful stuff and does not extra things that only have the purpose to capture the attention of the user. For example, I really hate it when I open a web browser with a blank page, to look up something I am working with, and it is full of advertisements for news for completely unrelated stuff up to sexual gossip and celibrity trash, when what I need to do is concentrated work. Once you have become aware of how much many nonfree software wastes your attention, and that this is actively against your interests, it is difficult to ignore that.
- it does not need to assume unrelated features to compete, which prevents feature bloat and improves usability (your picture viewing program does not need to be a file manager, and your image editing program not a publishing platform)
- preventing feature bloat and open interfaces also improves its interopoeration with other software (who does really believe that MS Word is usable?)
- preventing commercial-driven featuritis is also good for long-term usability. I learned to use Unix in 1994 I believe, and I can still navigate and inspect the file system using cd and ls.
- Using open standards also means, for software developers, that their knowledge does not goes out of date quickly or becomes unusable when they change employers. Non-free software tools have a much shorter half-life (anyone still using Silverlight or Visual Basic?), and this means a lot of your learning effort becomes useless after a few years. This might be a minor advantage for somebody who has worked one year or two but it makes a big big difference after many years of working.
- As a lot of innovation happens incrementally and evolutionary, and innovation is based on open exchange of ideas, free software is very open to innovation. At the same time, as working code can always be shared (as, for example, the code for the build daemon in NixOS and Guix), innovation is better conserved than in closed-source software with usual commercial licenses. At a previous employer, I mighhjt have done a really good job with some kind of signal processing which would be useful for things like making wind energy more reliable, but the project manager fucked that up, the software is closed source, and the effort is lost to humanity. I would very much prefer the generation of my niece to get the returns of the work I did.
I could go on for half an hour but I have something else to do :)
But, all of this boils down to that the software on somebody's computer is controlled by its user, not somebody else or a big company which has interests very different from him (or her), and this is what the GPL is about. And yes, the GPL is a means to some end, one could discuss how to reach its specific goal in a different way, but simply labeling its intention as "childish" is just FUD (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty,_and_doubt).