The GPL is designed to preserve the end-user's freedom. In order to do that, it only grants other distributors the right to copy it if they agree to grant the same rights to others they distribute it to.
Under copyright law with no license at all you would have no right to copy it at all; the GPL grants you additional rights, but only if you do the same in turn.
Complaining that that restricts your freedom is like complaining that it restricts your freedom to go to a country that forbids kidnapping. Sure, in stateless areas with no effective government, you may have the additional freedom to kidnap someone else, denying them their freedom. But on the whole, laws against kidnapping (or false imprisonment, or the like) are their to preserve freedom.
Likewise, the additional freedom that the MIT or BSD licenses grant you is the ability to deny other users the freedom to use and modify your works derived from the code.
Can we please stop having the argument that BSD or MIT give more "true freedom" than the GPL? The only additional freedom they give you is the ability to apply more restrictions to other people.
Now, you may not want to make the deal that the GPL makes, trading your code for a promise that other people who distribute it continue to offer the same freedoms that you offer. You may not really care what restrictions other people place on it, or on their modifications to it, after you've released it. You may even want to have the ability to collaborate with those who use their software licensing to restrict end user freedom. Or you may not want to deal with license compatibility headaches.
But arguing that "true freedom" comes from license like BSD or MIT, and not the GPL, is ridiculous; the GPL is designed to ensure that the software and all modifications to it will always remain free, while liberal licenses simply allow people to redistribute it with more restrictions, making the ecosystem less free, not more.
The GPL, MIT, BSD, and any other license that meets the requirements of the free software definition, Debian free software guidelines, or open source definition, are all "truly free," they just differ in whether they attempt to preserve that freedom transitively or not.
I don't think the FSF distinguishes between users and programmers. To them a user has the right to be a programmer on any piece of the software, and the license reflects this.
Yup. FSF's licenses are rooted in copyright, they say nothing about users, only distributors, because usage doesn't involve copying.
AGPL would be a notable exception though.
The GPL licenses give users freedom by forcing distributors to behave in certain ways.
sigh, Every time I hear this argument, I imagine a kid being given a big bag of candy, and asked to share and share alike in school. Feeling cheated out on eating it all, the kid cries about how repressed they are from not be able to decide who should be denied a taste.
If you want to eat it all, buy your own candy. Until then, be happy about the gift you have been given and enjoy sharing.
