A bunch of conspiracy theories added with RMS bashing.<p>> According to de Raadt, Stallman disclaimed all knowledge of the episode. ("The FSF is not involved in this dispute."). However it seems Eben Moglen had knowledge of what was going on, and since Moglen is the right hand of Stallman, it is hard to credit Stallman not knowing the existence of the dispute.<p>I am not involved in 9/11. I have knowledge about it, as got anyone who lived through 2009, but I am not involved. Yet accordingly to this person line of thinking, I have knowledge and thus must be involved.<p>But lets not focus on conspiracies. Lets talk about copyright law, as in "by law, a new person doing small changes to an original work is not allowed to assert copyright".<p>The originality threshold is, by law, not defined as being either small or large. A small change can be original, while at the same time, a large change might not. US courts has for example said that it require a minimal degree of creativity, which a small hand written change to a large code base might have. On that same line of thinking, a big batch of changes coming from automatic tools might not qualify for copyright, since the author of those changes has not contributed any act of creativity. The law focus is not about size, a fact easy forgotten when talking about copyright law.<p>After those two, the ramblings gets into "GPL is evil, proprietary software is good". They should join the "Freeing slaves are evil, slavery is good" folks.
A small change to a large body of work does not give you copyright over the work itself. no matter how original your change is. At most only over the change itself.<p>Stallman's statement 'The FSF is not involved in this dispute' (about the appropriation of BSD under GPL) might be interpreted as a statement of ignorance (I don't know what is going on) or as a disclaimer of involvement (I know what is going on, but the FSF is not involved). I find both interpretations to be straining the bounds of credibility and certainly Stallman knew after Theo wrote to him.<p>But this is not the important issue that the thread is focused on - which are the relations between BSD and GPL. Stallman defends the appropriation of BSD code under GPL (at great length) based on a faulty interpretation of law and that interpretation needs to be put right.<p>The analogy of any of this to 9/11 or slavery seems rather silly.