no need to keep non-copylefted files that way in a copylefted project. (was Re: FRR package in Debian violates the GPL licence)
David Lamparter wrote:
> The respective original authors have expressed and reaffirmed their wishes
> for the code to remain under a permissive license. . .. we have decided to
> try and honour the original author's requests.
That's an odd request, since it contradicts the terms of the license
they offered the code under originally. In fact, it's quite typical for
projects to take non-copylefted code and bring it into a copylefted project
and make copylefted changes thereafter. This has been in GCC, Linux, and
many of the most famous copyleft projects in history. This is permitted and
encouraged by non-copyleft FOSS licenses.
Specifically, the original author's request, expressed through their choice
of a non-copyleft license, was that downstream should have permission to
relicense under nearly any sort of downstream licenses, including proprietary
ones, so it seems to me that the authors are being a bit unfair to your
copyleft project by making demands of you that they aren't (presumably)
making of proprietary combiners of the code (i.e., if they didn't want the
proprietary combiners to relicense under licenses other than theirs, they'd
have used copyleft in the first place themselves).
This is an example of a common trend I see: social pressure to keep
non-copylefted code under non-copyleft licenses, sometimes even escalating to
aggression (as the OpenBSD project did with Linux over wireless drivers),
while permitting and even encouraging licensors to incorporate the code
under proprietary licenses, which are much more restricted of copyleft.
> P.S.: please Cc: me as I'm not subscribed to debian-legal.
Done.
--
Bradley M. Kuhn
Pls. support the charity where I work, Software Freedom Conservancy:
https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/
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