Thanks everyone for your thoughts on the licensing issue. The answer is a bit
long, so get ready. I'll add a copy of this answer, plus your questions and
comments, to the specification page.
As much as I would like to, I don't think that I am legally allowed to
license my contributions under the GPL. Some kernel hackers a while ago
ported a BSD driver to the Linux kernel, but then faced (what appeared to be
valid) legal threats from the OpenBSD team [1]. The reason is, that minor
changes are often not enough to be copyrightable, as they do not show
sufficient creativity. For example, you may license a ksh script, or a new C
source file under the GPL, but you may not license your tweaks to the kernel
config file, or the renaming of software under the GPL. Because the changes
that I have made mostly remove software, or make minor tweaks to it, I have
decided simply to release my changes into the public domain. It's not ideal,
but it's all I'm legally allowed to do.
Also, as suitsmeveryfine mentioned above, it is also good for tactical
reasons to license permissively. OpenBSD will *not* accept patches under the
GPL, so if I make an improvement to the system, I can't send it upstream and
I have to keep applying the patches every new release.
For what it's worth, the FSF would appear to agree. From their license guide
[2]:
When you contribute to an existing project, you should usually release your
modified versions under the same license as the original work. It's good to
cooperate with the project's maintainers, and using a different license for
your modifications often makes that cooperation very difficult. You should
only do that when there is a strong reason to justify it.
As for Firefox, since I'm not making a libre ports tree, and Firefox is not
included in OpenBSD base, I don't have to worry about deblobbing it.
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[1] http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20070913014315&mode=flat
[2] https://gnu.org/licenses/license-recommendations.html
