The point that Theo de Raadt is making is that this line of thinking is wrong*. Most of the FSF/GPL advocates never seem to look at the why's around people disliking their approach. See https://lkml.org/lkml/2007/9/1/102 as an example. OpenBSD helped the Linux project dual license the ath5k driver. They were thanked by GPL advocates illegally trying to strip the BSD license after the fact. Leaves a bad taste, and one that many of us won't forget. You can have your forced freedom.
* "GPL fans said the great problem we would face is that companies would take our BSD code, modify it, and not give back. Nope—the great problem we face is that people would wrap the GPL around our code, and lock us out in the same way that these supposed companies would lock us out. Just like the Linux community, we have many companies giving us code back, all the time.
But once the code is GPL'd, we cannot get it back."
EDIT: The pejoratives are why the FSF message gets lost on an awful lot of people. I admire what they are trying to achieve, the manner in which they go about it makes me not want to engage.
Theo de Raadt is the one who's wrong. When code goes closed source, you're locked out and can't have it at all anymore. When it goes GPL, you can still have it just by going GPL yourself.
“This is madness!
He has lost his mind!
This defies the first law of free trade.
Rule zero came before this rule one.
Freedom means you cannot dictate to anyone.” (emphasis mine)
I provided a reference for a portion of lyrics that fairly elegantly summarised the BSD position on freedom – that is it. Besides, it is a song and obviously it will take artistic liberties compared to an essay.
If you want to argue minutia related to things on that page other than the tiny lyric snippet, it is probably better that you send an e-mail to misc@.
They're describing libraries. By 'Linux', I'm assuming that you're referring to the OS distributions and not the kernel on it's own. And please drop the pejoratives.
There is seemingly a movement or line of thought that blames the success of “big tech” on permissive licenses. You do not see it as much on Hacker News, but it certainly has spread across IRC and many other forums. What is even odder is that a subset of it uses alt-right terminology to refer to both permissive licenses and their proponents. It is all very weird to experience as someone that entered the FLOSS community in the early 00s. Not to mention having had a personal conversation with rms bemoaning the license schisms and him explicitly expressing gratitude for the BSDs contributing to the larger FLOSS movement.
This is entirely untrue, though. Linux is GPL and it gets way more use than any of the pushover-licensed BSDs do.