[...]
Under this umbrella, the Linux kernel is effectively under the BSD
license.
Except that free software projects cannot copy from it - that's
quite a big BUT since allowing *everybody* to copy the code for
any purpose is the central idea of the BSD license. ;-)
[...]
The BSD camp did ultimately win the copyleft argument after all.
I'm not so sure about that. The idea of the BSD license is to
allow all uses that can be licensed to others according to the Berne
Convention, retaining only those rights - essentially the moral rights,
like being known as the author, and abuse of the Works for slandering
the author being prohibited - that are inalienable in the first place
according to the Berne Convention.
Even if in effect, the Copyleft aspect of the GPL is not usually
enforced against Foundation members, GPL code is far from as free
as the Berne Convention would permit it to be, and far from as free
as if it were under a BSD license.
So essentially, you say that in practice, the GPL fails to attain
the goals RMS designed it for, and i say that all the same, it has
some serious and (hopefully) unintended detrimental side effects.
I can't say i'm too happy with that.
I certainly don't regard it as a win.
It looks more like a lose-lose situation to me.
But i don't think we can do much about that. Groff is still
usable for most users without too much pain. Unless i want to
contribute significant amounts of code, even i could do so.
And to be fair, even if i wanted to contribute large amounts of
code, the GPL would *not* prevent me from doing that - the thing
the would stop me is the FSF CLA, which is an entirely different
beast.
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