Let me rephrase the quote for you: "once the code is GPL'd, we cannot get the modifications back"

That's what he meant. Look at the full context.

And you can from proprietary licensed modifications?

FSF recommendation is that you use the same license as the project which you are contributing to. If you use a BSD project, contribute your patches under BSD. If its GPL, contribute under GPL. If you combine work under BSD and GPL and write modifications, contribute back the modifications based on what code you are doing modification for.

The proprietary way is to release modification only if its make a business sense to do so, and I don't know if OpenBSD actually has a official recommendation in this aspect. If they do, its not something I have ever seen.

That's not the point. Let me rephrase that:

- one of GPL's cool thing is that it prevents proprietary software from including GPL'd code without contributing back to the community

- Because BSD is not as strict as GPL regarding license derivation, GPL says "BSD is bad, you're allowing proprietary software to use BSD code without giving back"

- Some people take BSD code, modify it and distribute modifications under GPL

- Because of this, the original BSD code authors can't benefit from the modifications, only GPL projects can... doing exactly what GPL was against in the first place (preventing authors from enjoying modifications)

Theo is only pointing out the irony of it all.

> exactly what GPL was against in the first place (preventing authors from enjoying modifications)

This is not an accurate description of what the GPL is shooting for, which has significant consequences on the things built up from this misunderstanding.

You're right, it is important to remind that GPL is shooting for user freedom, and final users getting free access to modifications; that authors enjoy modifications is only a nice side-effect that isn't even required at all, but is in practice common. The misunderstanding seems to be from the clear separation between users and developers that GPL does.

One could argue that the they can get the GPL project, build over it too and distribute it.

Not much a comparison to proprietary software.

But then they would not be free to use the BSD license, they would have to use the GPL license. If you were able to take a GPL project and "wrap it" in a BSD license, then you would be taking away all of the GPL restrictions effectively rendering the GPL null and void. Do you really think that it is that "easy" to skirt the GPL? What point is the GPL if all you need to do is "wrap it" in a BSD project and then everything becomes BSD licensed?

I guess that other way that I could interpret your response is that you are suggestion that the BSD people should just relicense their stuff as GPL to be able to use GPL'd project. This really ignores the points being made (if this is what you are saying).

You can ask all copyright holders of the code since the code was GPL'd to relicense the code under a different license (BSD presumably). If only one declines you can't use their code and anything based on it.