preferred form

Some people seem to think that the change to the source distribution effects their rights under freedom 1 ("The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish") of the FSF philosophy, which is what the GPL is meant to represent through copyright law.

I think any argument that they are breaking the word of the GPL with this change is pretty tenuous but I can understand why people are a bit upset about it. Also people love to rage about things and GPL compliance is easy to bikeshed over.