Richard Stallman writes:
A couple of people responded to this
It isn't surprising that people who want to write non-free software are disappointed that the GNU project won't help them. What is amazing is that they feel this is unfair.
by expressing doubt that anyone really thinks so.
Well I don't think it's unfair, and it's my post you quoted as an example! Anyone who writes something is clearly free to put anything they like in their licenses. This was not the point being made. As there seems to be some confusion, let me try to summarise why several people have said they prefer BSD license (or indeed LGPL) to GNU GPL _in the particular case of crypto code_: Cypherpunks are interested to deploy crypto code with out backdoors (`cypherpunks write code' and all that). Consider for a moment that this is your primary aim. It is useful to build upon on other cypherpunks code. (Having to code everything from scratch is going to take you a long time..., let's see we'll start with re-writing a bignum library from scratch). You would like your code to be widely deployed, and some companies are good at distributing code. If you could get them to include crypto in their applications that would be a lot of crypto out there. So when someone writes crypto code form this perspective the BSD license better achieves their aim. This is not an insult to the FSF's aims. The BSD license (for example) is in some ways more free than the GNU license: it allows free distribution, but is less strict in propagating this to derived works. This lesser strictness is useful for crypto deployment because it allows commercial derivative works (what you have termed proprietary) software. Cypherpunks want to encourage these also, though they would prefer that source be available so that people can check for quality, correctness, and for backdoors. The comments on having to re-write GNU code which several people made (in the context of crypto software) are not saying that it is "unfair that GNU contributers don't do free work for the cypherpunk cause", what it is saying is this: If your aim is to maximise crypto deployment, use BSD or some other relatively free distribution license other than GNU, so that we can more rapidly write and deploy crypto software to undermine the power of the state. Adam