[nknight]

You appear to have taken a very libertarian worldview and attempted to apply it to software. That's OK, but you have to realize that, as in the political realm, your views are not even close to universal, and some of them are definitely in the minority.

Social contracts are, by their very nature, a reflection of some sort of societal consensus. The societal consensus is not in (full) agreement with you on this matter.

You could advocate your views of what the social contract should be, that's OK, too, but claiming that your minority views are the social contract and that everybody else has to follow them or be somehow "wrong" is, at best, disingenuous.

[nupark2]

I'm simply explaining the BSD/proprietary viewpoints. They're obviously contrary to the GPL+FSF viewpoint, but they're not logically inconsistent.

In his article, Zed actually said "we're both on the same damn side". However -- barring the use of open hardware reference information across OSS implementations -- that's not really the case.

The GPL and BSD licenses are competitive memes, and the ultimate success of the GPL (as per the FSF's goals) would be at the expense of the BSD and proprietary licenses.

[nknight]

No, you're explaining your viewpoint, and claiming it represents a "social contract".

While I periodically hear whining from some people, particularly the OpenBSD crowd, about other open-source projects using their code, I've seen no evidence of it constituting "the BSD viewpoint".

By the way, the only significant open source software I ever released was under the BSD license. I chose BSD because it made the most sense for what I was trying to accomplish, and specifically did not want to prevent anyone from using the code in any way they saw fit. It would never occur to me to whine about somebody doing just that.

[nupark2]

Whether or not you recognize or care about these issues doesn't change the logic behind BSD developer's complaints regarding GPL re-licensing of BSD code, or somehow create a double standard.