"it merely let those specific developers feel better by sophomorically raising the proverbial middle finger to 'thieving' commercial interests"
Oh man. Fine, you don't like the GPL. We get that. But to say the license change should have been irrelevant is to say that developers should be code-crapping robots with nary an expectation of a social contract. Some devs dig BSD. That's great. But some of us actually like Stallman's four freedoms and in certain situations need to see them guaranteed. Deal with it.
It's not a GPL "success story". You preferred the GPL, you were going to write the code anyway, and you did. At no point in this process was the GPL somehow conveying an advantage beyond satiating your desire to lock out external users/contributors who were potential 'thieves'.
The analogy I gave earlier still fits -- you could have just as easily called new code style conventions a "success story", despite the fact that they aren't the primary driver behind getting something done.
The most audacious aspect of the story is that by locking up future work via the GPL, you've done what you accuse external entities of doing: locking out previous BSD-licensed contributors from your future improvements to the project.
Haha! "Thieves." "Locking out." You're just an anti-GPL zealot. If using the GPL makes me audacious, then call me audacious. Now go troll somewhere else.
Oh man. Fine, you don't like the GPL. We get that. But to say the license change should have been irrelevant is to say that developers should be code-crapping robots with nary an expectation of a social contract. Some devs dig BSD. That's great. But some of us actually like Stallman's four freedoms and in certain situations need to see them guaranteed. Deal with it.