When I download a piece of code under the BSD license, I am the user. I am free to do whatever I please with that code, including to modify it, and release the modifications under a different license (ie executable only, heavy DRM, whatever).
Anyone is still free to use the original release under the original license. They can modify it, improve it, and perhaps release those changes again under the BSD license. No one has lost any freedoms at all under these scenarios.
What RMS and cohorts really want is not freedom the way it is usually understood. As he explains clearly, he wants a world without reliance on any proprietary, "non-free" (by his definition) software. By extension, the free software crowd is basically against the concept of intellectual property in its entirety.
What the GPL does is create a scenario where users are restricted from ever creating modified versions of the software licensed under terms of their choosing. The viral nature of the license forces users to continue enforcing those restrictions on all descendent versions of the software. The goal, quite clearly, is to foster a world of software that is fundamentally impossible to "sell" commercially in any shape or form. The new restrictions on patents and services in the AGPL3 make this agenda strikingly clear.
In the world I inhabit, permissive licensing frankly provides a way for a multiplicity of parties to communally build things of potential use to all members of the community. However, it does not restrict those members from branching off the communal tree for profit or any other reason. The collective work stands as a sort of "commons" that all farmers can allow their cattle to graze on. However it also allows for each farmer to maintain private grazing lands in addition to the commons.
Yes, in such a scenario some farmers could game the system by over-grazing -- in the analogy, that would mean taking lots of code and never giving back. Naively it would seem the GPL approach is better for disallowing this selfish behavior. But in the real world, the price for such draconian policing is the inability of anyone to create a reasonable business case for developing software -- no one can ever profit from the work they contributed. Richard Stallman may be fine with that scenario (I understand he was born wealthy), but it doesn't work for anyone who has to sling code for a living.
