Nathan Myers writes:
When discussing Debian/BSD with BSD adherents, I encountereda current of hostility.
And vice versa...I catch far, far more flack for talking about BSD from Linux folks than talking about Linux with BSD folks. Orders of magnatude. Well...except for Theo de Raadt. But that's a special case.
I traced the hostility to a misconception on their part: They think we want to relicense their stuff under the GPL.
Even if you wanted to, you can't. You aren't the holders of the license. This should be made clear to the other side of the fence, especially those who have, shall we say, fanatical devotion to the GPL. You cannot take a BSD licensed program, slap a GPL license on it, and expect it to hold unless the original license holder consents. Nor can you modify it and slap a GPL on it. The rights of the original author must be repected. This is why GNU had to reimpliment everything.
An official announcement that we have no intention of relicensing any BSD packages would go a long way toward relaxing any latent hostility, and might make active cooperation (e.g. upstreampatches) more conceivable.
That's optimistic. I suspect the hostility on both sides stems from far more fundamental issues than this. Ken Seefried, CISSP