With both "free" and "permissive" licenses, everyone who gets code from the original author can use the code for pretty much whatever they want—boil it, mash it, stick it in a stew—but for code under a "permissive" licence, downstream recipients do not necessarily have the same rights. For example, Microsoft used some of the BSD sockets implementation in NT's network stack, but Windows users do not have the same rights of modification and redistribution for that code that Microsoft enjoyed, even if they separately obtain a permissive licence to that code by downloading a fresh copy of the code from the original authors.

Thus, "permissive" licenses tend to split a community into at least two groups: developers who can make use of the original code directly and enjoy the liberties the "permissive" licence allows, and users who are only allowed to use the things the developers create for them, and have none of the liberties granted by the original licence. By contrast, a "Free" licence (in the FSF sense) guarantees that everybody who obtains some piece of code, no matter how far removed from the original developer, has exactly the same rights to it. Thus, it does not split the community in the same way, and that's why some people regard "Free" licences as more community-friendly and useful than "permissive" licences.