Department of Not Getting It

Checking out DistroWatch to if there was any new or upgraded Linux or BSD distribution, I saw a supposedly new BSD, PCBSD. It looked promising. It's pretty much FreeBSD but with a supposedly friendlier installer and set up to be a desktop OS right off. This is something that BSD has been lacking. Sure, you run BSD on the desktop after some fiddling around, but many would prefer not to fiddle around thus.

So far, so good. Then I looked at the licensing and got a nasty surprise. The core was BSD licensed, of course, but "All software custom developed for PC-BSD is released under the GNU General Public License..." It's not BSD. It's a bad hybrid. Sure, I know some applications, such as KDE, are unavoidably GPL and it makes some sense to use them. But to specifically make improvements to a BSD and then license them under GPL is grating in its wrongness. I can only hope that BSD folks look at the idea and decide it'd be good to do it right. I don't want to see some addlepated chucklehead calling for a renaming to "GNU/BSD" - the avoidance of such idiocy is one of the more attractive features of BSD.