He's right. The entire premise of open source licensing is that the work is copyrightable, so it uses the copyright system to enforce the authors distribution requirements.
I don't believe that software should be subject to copyright so I put the GPL on my code to protect it from those that do. Fight fire with fire, eh?
The situation you are describing is closer to a project with an "unlicense," e.g. SQLite, which explicitly makes the project public-domain and places no restrictions whatsoever on its use.