Hello!

On Sat, Sep 01, 2007 at 12:54:38AM -0400, David H. Lynch Jr. wrote:
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>   BSD Licensed code has found its way into proprietary products, with  
>no availability of source -

Which is exactly one characteristic of BSD vs. GPL, that BSD doesn't
require you to distribute source should you chose to distribute binaries
(as permitted by the BSD license).

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>   BUT I am having a hard time convincing myself that taking BSD/ISC 
>Licensed code - and relicensing it while preservng the
>   copyright notice, violates the BSD/ISC License.

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>   Whether it is honest or not, it still seems to conform to my 
>understanding of both the spirit and the letter of the license.

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>   BSD advocates claim their license is more free because it allows you 
>to do most anything with BSD code.
>   Am I missing the part where that freedom includes  removing the 
>license  ?

IMO it's by copyright law itself. Relicensing/sublicensing is by default
a reserved right, so it has to be explicitly granted in a license if
licensees should be allowed to relicense/sublicense. That explicit grant
is *not* present in the BSD/ISC licenses I've looked at in this moment.
The BSD/ISC licenses grant the rights (that are reserved by copyright
law) to use, (re)distribute and modify the work itself, and *those*
rights are bound by only few conditions (fewer than the GPL imposes).

Of course, you may make a derived/combined work where your own
contribution is of a different license. But the original part of the
work remains BSD/ISC licensed. The combined work is only usable when
a licensee can fulfill the conditions of *both* licenses in order to be
granted the rights granted by *both* licenses.

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>    How is what Linux developers seem to be doing less legal or ethical 
>that what many commercial developers have already done ?

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>    If this is not one of the freedom's of BSD Licensed code, then 
>craft your license to prohibit it.

As said, IMO and as far as I understand, it's not a matter of the
licenses themselves, but of copyright law itself. It's a matter that
the licenses (both BSD/ISC *and* GPL) have no clauses permitting
re/sublicensing.

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Kind regards,

Hannah.