Re: is igmpproxy dfsg compliant?
On Tuesday 22 November 2016 14:20:36 Roberto wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 20, 2016 at 02:52:33PM +0100, Pali Rohár wrote:
> > Because igmpproxy is based on mrouted originally licensed under Stanford
> > and later relicensed under BSD, I would consider it DFSG compliant...
>
> For what is worth, my point of view follows:
>
> In general, when a program is relicensed, the new license is not applied
> automatically to forks and derivative versions. Imagine that I make a
> GPL program that the igmpproxy developers modify and include into
> igmpproxy. I later relicense my code to a license incompatible with the
> GPL; igmpproxy won't automatically switch to the new license unless
> everyone agree (and probably will never happen because they are fine
> with the GPL version).
>
> If the new license of mrouted is better, we can expect that all
> developers and contributors will be happy to switch, but it must be done
> by them, nobody else can switch the license in their behalf unless they
> give permission.
>
> According to the source repository of igmpproxy, it is stil using the
> Standford license.
Based on information provided by (old) igmpproxy webpage [1] its license
is "GNU General Public License version 2.0". README file [2] in version
0.1 contains: "This software is released under the GNU GPL license v2.".
And finally COPYING file in version 0.1 [3] has GPL version 2 with some
information that software is derived work from smcroute 0.92 which was
licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 2. And that
smcroute 0.92 was derivative work of mrouted which was licensed under
Stanford.txt (and later relicensed to BSD).
Note that smcroute 0.92 was accepted into Debian [4].
Due to above GPL facts in igmpproxy files I think that everybody though
igmpproxy is licensed and distributed under GPL. If it was legal and I
correct I do not know... But since 2003 after mrouted got alternative BSD
license I think it is correct to redistribute smcroute 0.92 and so also
igmpproxy under GPL as states in [1], [2], [3].
And if Debian really had not problem to include smcroute 0.92 into
archives in 2006 [4] I guess there should not be problem to include also
derivate works from smcroute 0.92 licensed under GPL.
... Or do you have any other opinion which could cause problem in this
situation?
[1] - https://sourceforge.net/projects/igmpproxy/
[2] - https://sourceforge.net/p/igmpproxy/code/ci/0.1/tree/README
[3] - https://sourceforge.net/p/igmpproxy/code/ci/0.1/tree/COPYING
[4] - https://packages.qa.debian.org/s/smcroute/news/20060624T145546Z.html
--
Pali Rohár
pali.rohar@gmail.com
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