>They are two different conceptions of freedom,

There aren’t different conceptions of freedom just many abuses of the term to fit some bewildering environments like software. This you will learn in the first year in philosophy. A dictionary or maybe the Wikipedia isn’t a real help to understand it and this is the problem of Stallman too, he misuses the term because he doesn’t understand it. A license without a copyleft has something to do with confidence. First the human being, then the rest. There is no software first or something similar if you’re talking of freedom. Stop the mockery, please or use something different than freedom.

> RMS: It is absurd to speak of the
> “freedom to take away others’ freedom”.
> The absence of that absurdity is what they
> are complaining about.

http://www.ofb.biz/article.pl?sid=353

I’d say the FSF/GPL view is “BSD-licensed software is less good, because it can be incorporated into proprietary software, and then people might use that proprietary software, which would impinge on their freedom. The free software movement is important because it creates software that helps people while preserving their freedom.”

Whereas the BSD view is “GPL-licensed software is less good, because it can’t be incorporated into as many different kinds of software, and so it is overall less likely that developers will be able to use it to help users solve their problems. The open source movement is important because it’s a great way for lots of people to work together to create software that helps people solve their problems.”

In the US I’ve seen a number of people whose political leanings are somewhere around those of the Libertarian Party define themselves as “anarchists”, and these people have often decried anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist communists and socialists who also call themselves “anarchists” on the grounds that a prohibition on capitalism is considered to a restriction on these people; the anarchists of the Left then counter that capital is merely an abstraction of power, power means among other things “being able to tell people what to do”, and ultimately it boils down to a question of the extent to which a “free” society means that its members have the “freedom” to restrict the “freedoms” of others.

So I’ve often thought that those who tell the anarchosyndicalists and anarchocommunists that their freedom isn’t really free (because it means they wouldn’t be able to restrict the freedom of others by introducing wage-slavery), and those who tell users of the GPL that their freedom isn’t really free (because it means they wouldn’t be able to restrict the freedom of others by stopping them using copies of the code freely) are arguing along rather similar lines.

Yes, the impingement is voluntary to the extent the software itself is voluntary. (see also people’s objection to MS Windows licensing yet their continued use of it)

Rather, the central question is *whose* freedoms are being guaranteed.

In the case of the BSD license, the secondary developers’ rights (i.e. those receiving the BSD-licensed code) are (mostly; there are still some restrictions regarding copyright notices) maintained at the expense of allowing the downstream users/developers rights to be impinged upon.

In the case of the GPL, the secondary developers’ rights are impinged upon to maintain the downstream user/developers’ rights.