Re:GPL frees end users. BSD? Nooot so much... (Score 1)

That's incredibly naive. I have modified source of several free projects for independent contractors I know, and I'm hardly a household name.

But you are an exception.

My company has used work-for-hire developers to fix bugs and add enhancements to free software for internal use. You seem to be limiting "support services" to only proprietary-style professional companies that advertise those services in the Wall Street Journal. Open your eyes, my friend - custom modification of free software is ubiquitous. Custom modification for BSD-taken-proprietary is... limited to the company that released the product.

What you described here is paid work. While you choose to make a distinction between being able to hire somebody and firing off bug reports and feature requests to a company in hopes of a fix, the real limitation here is money. If FOSS is so open and everyone participates, why is your company having to hire people to patch your software? That's the real divide - money, not licensing.

The number of projects period is astounding. Some of them are incredibly useful; most aren't, because SourceForge is free. Exactly like SlashDot and posts. :-)

All hilarity aside, you can stargaze all you want but I'm only concerned with things in the useful orbit. The number of software projects with a robust codebase and regular release schedule is small, and only some of them are useful. But again we see that your license of choice isn't helping end-users (by making available worthwhile software) or developers (by helping them to write worthwhile software).

By restricting the developer(s), the GPL restricts the developer down the line - particularly, from taking free code and making it non-free, thus limiting what users can do.

But making for a much more solid product. For a real-world example, let's look at WebKit, the muscle behind Safari, iTunes, iChat, and scads of other software packages. (Check at Wikipedia for an exhaustive list.) Apple took that software and did a lot with it without it being under a Free or Open Source license. It's FOSS now, but hadn't been and the FOSS community has done little to enhance it.

Precisely my argument. BSD license frees the developer to use the code for more projects - specifically, proprietary projects. But proprietary projects limit the freedom of end-users - they cannot fix bugs, or further reuse the code.

They don't anyway, unless they happen to have programming experience and are being paid. The number of hobbyists doing any real (released) work is microscopic in proportion to the number of end-users. And they're probably the same people who have jobs doing whatever it is they do with their GPL'ed software.

GPL protects the user's freedoms by ensuring that free code remains free.

And tying deevelopers' hands with multiple restrictions with a small and dubious benefit to end-users.