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The GPL doesn't forbid charging for software licensed with it. The Free Software Foundation even encourages you to sell your GPL'ed software [1]. However, once you have the software, you can do whatever you like with it, and that includes giving it away for free.

[1] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html

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Right, which is why some companies (such as MySQL AB) charge for support and custom tools instead of the software itself (which is always free to use). The senior programmer I spoke of called them and their marketing staff was of course desperate at the chance to make some money, so she came off thinking that we would have to pay for MySQL. And of course, there's the whole "you have to release all of your source code if you use MySQL anywhere our system!" fallacy.

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