I wanted to give the issue of use of the GPL and the BSD to a separate thread because there is a lot of confusion about the issues here. The whole debate has been fogged by misinformation provided by the FSF concerning copyright. Quite of lot of programmers in the open source movement believe that because BSD is a liberal 'do as thou wilt' license; it is OK to 'relicense' BSD code under GPL. This is a myth. Feel free to copy this post to news groups.
The whole BSD/GPL issue came up in 2007 in the OpenBSD group where an OS programmer Reyk created a program under BSD that the GPL Linux folks wanted to place under GPL. You can read De Raadt's account here.
http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20070913014315The story Theo gave, and I believe him, is that GPL Linux people pestered Reyk to allow them to license the code under GPL which he would not. According to Theo, they then simply took it and removed his name and put their names on top and GPLed it. This is of course illegal. When caught out, they resorted to a series of subterfuges including an argument that any BSD program could be 'relicensed' by having the GPL placed on it. According to de Raadt, Stallman disclaimed all knowledge of the episode. ("The FSF is not involved in this dispute."). However it seems Eben Moglen had knowledge of what was going on, and since Moglen is the right hand of Stallman, it is hard to credit Stallman not knowing the existence of the dispute. Here you will find him actively defending the Linux/GPL position with a view of copyright that is quite wrong.
http://openbsd.7691.n7.nabble.com/Real-men-don-t-attack-straw-men-tt55042.html#none This is a very long thread (> 900 messages and I read them all) so type license into the search box if you want to read what Stallman says. His posts are masterpieces of prevarication and obfuscation.
De Raadt fought his corner and good for him; the GPL people backed down under threat of legal action. Theo says; and he is worth quoting because he is right.
But that is the clincher -- by law, a new person doing small changes to an original work is not allowed to assert copyright, and hence, gains none of the rights given by copyright law, and hence, cannot assert a license (copyright licenses surrender a subset of the
author's rights which the law gives them; the licenses do not not assert rights out of thin air).
Of course a decent organisation would have never tried such a disrespectful trick on an OS project. Unfortunately this relicensing idea has spread to the news groups.
Now it is open to me as copyright holder, to dual license the kernel to GPL, but I will not do so until there are some fundamental root and branch reforms of the FSF. Like what you ask? Well, here they are.
1. The whole 'closed source is evil' meme needs to be dropped. Programmers are entitled to do with their own work as they want, and it is obnoxious to call somebody a 'thief' as Stallman did to Bryan Lunduke (see 55m and after), merely for writing closed source games to feed his family. The arguments Stallman uses to support his position are lamentably weak. It is doubly obnoxious and hypocritical to do so because the FSF has been in receipt of donations from companies that make money from closed source.
2. Many of the programmers contributing to GPL are doing the work pro bono for little or nothing. Yet a vast income in the legal arm (SFLC) of the FSF is being trousered by lawyers. Moglen is making a huge sum in addition to his income as a law professor at Columbia. The lawyers need to work under the same conditions that programmers do.
3. Creative rights do need to be respected. Stallman's advocacy of piracy under 'the right to read' is just an endorsement of a criminal offence; particularly if the author is relying on book revenue to get by.
I would also add, not as a requirement, but as a wish, that the Orwellian use of the word 'free' to describe the GPL should be dropped.
This does not affect the ability to write GPL programs on top of Shen, but no part of my code will be relicensed to GPL until these reforms are instituted.
Mark