Making a Eclipse plug-ins does not make it a derivative of Eclipse. As such, you can have any license on the plug-in. Any. Only derivative works of eclipse will have to be under the Eclipse license, and only in those cases will the work license be incompatible with GPL (since both licenses has their unique requirements).
A less protective license such as BSD might allow for different use cases than GPL, but some users of that BSD work will be faced with the fact that they are going to get sued if they try to modify or share the program. Be that because of the person who happened to distribute it, or patents, or DRM. The greater freedom you are talking about is then the "freedom" to get sued for doing hacker-worthy programming.
My mistake regarding the Eclipse License, and I stand corrected.
However, I stand behind my statement regarding BSD. Because of the restrictive nature of the GPL, one cannot take open code with it, and combine it with code written under other Free licenses, such as the CDDL. One risks being sued, etc, for that. Look at the problems that arose over cdrtools, for example. There are much less restrictive ways to solve what the GPL purports to fix, such as the Apache license.
If a author want to license their software to be explicit incompatible for any developer out there who uses GPL, then that is within the power of that author. This is what some seem to claim happened with cdrtools. If the author tomorrow wanted to make it a BSD incompatible software, it is also within the authors right.
If a company or person takes apache licensed code and distribute it under new terms, they are in legal right to sue their users if any dare to do modification, run modifications, or share the program. If you license a program under a permissive license, one have to accept that some people might end up in jail for wanting to do changes to your code. The GPL protection is there if you want it, but no author is forced to use it. As I said in a above comment, there is no helmet law for developers.
However, you are quite wrong about Eclipse plug-ins, and I suggest that one reads the eclipse legal FAQ before going at the license flame war.
- http://www.eclipse.org/legal/eplfaq.phpMaking a Eclipse plug-ins does not make it a derivative of Eclipse. As such, you can have any license on the plug-in. Any. Only derivative works of eclipse will have to be under the Eclipse license, and only in those cases will the work license be incompatible with GPL (since both licenses has their unique requirements).
A less protective license such as BSD might allow for different use cases than GPL, but some users of that BSD work will be faced with the fact that they are going to get sued if they try to modify or share the program. Be that because of the person who happened to distribute it, or patents, or DRM. The greater freedom you are talking about is then the "freedom" to get sued for doing hacker-worthy programming.