Licenses alone do not govern behavior in open source
I think this is a dangerous mode of thinking. The purpose of a license is to outline  what rights I have with regards to copying the software (and redistributing it). If I have the right to do something, then I ought to be able to do it, even if you request otherwise.<p>Imagine if some corporation licensed their software with the GPL, but then &quot;requested&quot; that you not repackage that software for Windows. Would that be a &quot;healthy response&quot; on the part of the company? I don&#x27;t think so. The GPL clearly states that I have the right to redistribute modified copies of the software, so long as I make my changes available to others.<p>In this case, the software is licensed under the MIT license. MIT is an even looser license than GPL; a redistributor can take the software, make changes to it, and redistribute the modified version as a <i>closed source</i> binary, so long as they acknowledge the original creator. Repackaging the software is clearly within the rights of the NixOS maintainers, and they&#x27;ve chosen to exercise their rights as defined by the law. To argue that they have some unwritten obligation to respect the wishes of the package author subverts the intent of free software, which is that the software that runs on my computer is <i>mine</i>, to run and&#x2F;or modify as <i>I</i> wish.<p>If the package author wishes to restrict his users from modifying their software, there is a very simple remedy: release the software under a non-free license that restricts redistribution. The way they&#x27;re behaving now is an attempt to eat their cake (restrict the way software can be modified and distributed) and have it too (get credit for releasing software under a free software license).<p>EDIT: Swapped out BSD in favor of Windows in my first example, because it seems that people were getting confused between BSD (the operating system) and BSD (the license)