&gt; As do the BSD and especially(?) the Apache Software License.<p>Suppose someone forked BSD kernel, modified it heavily over years and made a closed source product of out of it (you don&#x27;t actually need to suppose it anyway). Users get <i>zero</i> out of four freedoms they would have gotten with GPL.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;philosophy&#x2F;free-sw.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;philosophy&#x2F;free-sw.html</a><p>As a user, you now can&#x27;t freely run the kernel on multiple computers as you like, you are not allowed to investigate what the binary blob actually does on your hardware, you&#x27;re not allowed to give a copy to your friend, and you&#x27;re not allowed to make patches and redistribute.
So while this worked very well for some company and allowed them to launch a series of products in series quickly (which translated into billions in revenues), it screwed all of the four basic freedoms for all (paying) users.<p>Now tell me, how exactly is BSD license going to protect my rights as a user here?<p>As for the original developers of BSD, I&#x27;m guessing they might have been happier if that company contributed (some of) their changes back. Or maybe a few bucks from the billions of dollars they made.<p>BSD license basically gave the company to screw everyone else, both end users and original developers. Only a free software license such as GPL protects them both.<p>&gt; make the code more resistant to forks, esp. less free<p>GPL doesn&#x27;t have any restriction on forks. At all. Re-licensing and forking are orthogonal concepts.<p>&gt; opens an option for the original author of code to do dual-licensing<p>That doesn&#x27;t have anything to do with GPL itself.<p>&gt; provides an opportunity for the authors to prevent certain uses of the code<p>It guarantees that four freedoms mentioned in the above link are protected.