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altairprime's idea seems to be to sell the software to your users, but hire them as contractors to modify the gpl code so they can not redistribute it themselves.

So on perm saas where the on perm operators are technical hired for $1 so the software was never legally distributed to the company that hired the on perm saas service.

Seems dubious to me.

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Specifically, it’s dubious because GPLv3 requires the third party’s modification and/or hosted operation to be exclusively on behalf of / for the client. A judge and/or jury would need to evaluate whether the license is legally valid in that jurisdiction, and whether an attempt to circumvent the spirit of the license through obligating a contracted third-party to use the code would regardless still comply. (For example, QA is permissible use, but what if QA has to be done at scale in a for-profit production environment by the contracted third party, etc.) I expect that a reasonable and demonstrated set of modifications and setting and enforcement milestones would both be essential to a determination in favor of it being permissible use — but of course I cannot guarantee this with certainty, lacking any prior judgments to refer to. (I am not your lawyer, this is not legal advice.)

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