Thanks for the thoughts! I'll modify the Viral line to say "Compatible" rather than the same.
From the perspective of "what can I do with this code", if you modify a BSD-licensed file, and include GPL code, the entire file will be essentially under the GPL license.
In theory, could you parse out individual lines? Maybe. Theoretically.
But in practice, the file is now GPL.
The Weak versus Strong notions come from the FSF- That's not my terminology. I do think my descriptions are accurate, and don't disagree with you. What am I missing?
WRT AGPL, I'll clarify. I agree with you, and may not have made this clear enough.
"""From the perspective of "what can I do with this code", if you modify a BSD-licensed file, and include GPL code, the entire file will be essentially under the GPL license."""
That's not true. If I have some BSD-licensed code, and Bob copies a GPL'd function into it somewhere, Alice can still copy out BSD'd code from it and use it in her proprietary project.
It is very important to distinguish between "must comply with the GPL" and "must relicense to the GPL".
"""The Weak versus Strong notions come from the FSF- That's not my terminology. I do think my descriptions are accurate, and don't disagree with you. What am I missing?"""
You describe weak-vs-strong as being about whether proprietary software can use some library. The actual distinction is how proprietary software can use that library. Weaker licenses provide authors of proprietary software with more options (such as static linking).
I think we have a pragmatic difference of opinion on your first point.
I have a difficult time accepting that many people are going to track licenses on separate lines of a file into perpetuity.
I'm aware of the Aggregate clause in the GPL, but to apply that you need to get into whether or not various lines are "extensions" of the original work, and it's a beast.
I really think that people are best just treating each file as GPL, if you add GPL code to it.
As for Linking, I don't think you can legally link to a GPL program, from a non-GPL program.
This is why the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPL_linking_exception exists.
The GPL says that GPL and proprietary code "are not combined in a way that would make them effectively a single program."
From the perspective of "what can I do with this code", if you modify a BSD-licensed file, and include GPL code, the entire file will be essentially under the GPL license.
In theory, could you parse out individual lines? Maybe. Theoretically. But in practice, the file is now GPL.
The Weak versus Strong notions come from the FSF- That's not my terminology. I do think my descriptions are accurate, and don't disagree with you. What am I missing?
WRT AGPL, I'll clarify. I agree with you, and may not have made this clear enough.