Why is Fedora not a Free GNU/Linux distributions?

[Antonio Olivares]

> Open source, not GPL'd - they mean different but
> overlapping things. 
> The *bsd's have always been open sourced but all of the
> original unix 
> functionality from the AT&T underpinnings was
> re-written.  OpenSolaris 
> should include as much of the originally proprietary work
> as they have 
> been able to release.
> 
> Some people might not choose to restrict their work that
> way and much 
> work that has already been done can't now be GPL'd.
> 
> But the *bsd's scratch your back without making any
> demands - and would 
> consider them philosophically and morally wrong.
> 
> But the GPL concept of prohibiting redistribution unless
> requirements on 
> the 'work as a whole' are met makes this impossible
> in many cases, 
> especially at the kernel level where components like
> drivers and 
> filesystems become part of the 'whole'.
> 
> -- 

I like FreeBSD and I see that it has GPL'd code as well as BSD code.  The Desktop environments KDE and GNOME are released as GPL code, but they are included in FreeBSD.  They do not care that it is released as GPL, they still include it.  Now if I get your point right, the GPL requires that since BSD uses KDE which is GPL'd to then release BSD under a GPL license because of its restrictions.  I know that the above is not true, but it is an analogy of what the requirements would be.  

I see many people got mad because of cdrtools had issues with GPL and Jorg released his code under the CDDL, which is a free/opensource license, but it cannot live with the GPL and thus had to produce a GPL'd one and they created the fork which now lives in many Linux distributions:

http://lwn.net/Articles/198171/

However, some distributions still use cdrtools from Jorg, they did not buy into the idea that the fork was needed and still release cdrtools with their products.  Was it the GPL that forced cdrtools removal from many distributions, or what is more personal between Debian developers and Jorg?

Is this is an example of how the GPL messes up the freedoms to share and improve code?

Regards,

Antonio