"women's rights", the actual underlying disagreement is over when a {zygote,embryo,fetus,baby} is endowed with humanity (basically, the modern version of ensoulment). No, it's actually about freedom. It seems that the disagreement over which licensing scheme is more "free" may be reducible to a question over whose freedom we're discussing. Ah. A glimmer of hope. A ray of light. Obviously, the original author is free to license her code however she wants, and that fact is typically a first- or second-round throwaway line. However, the BSD camp appears be considering freedom from the perspective of other developers, emphasizing the freedom to incorporate BSD-licensed code into another system, without imposing conditions on that other system. That's a second order effect. The first order -- the goal -- is that the recipient can do whatever the hell he likes with the code. Including not worrying about finding a source disk if he shares the object code. This is very much an end user freedom, no matter how much the GPL camp tries to paint it otherwise. Effectively, BSD accepts some level of defection from the community by developers (e.g., Apple) in exchange for lower barriers to the use of a common codebase. When you start talking about "defection" from a "community" you've obviously stopped talking about freedom. The GPL camp, conversely, focuses on the perspective of downstream users, emphasizing that GPL'd code can't (easily) become the basis of a locked-down, unmodifiable, or (especially) incompatible system By imposing costs on everybody. (And then winking