Re: no need to keep non-copylefted files that way in a copylefted project. (was Re: FRR package in Debian violates the GPL licence)
* Bradley M. Kuhn:
> 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.
It is not always clear whether the changes are subject to the
surrounding project's license or the original (non-copyleft) license.
> 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).
The behavior becomes much more reasonable if you assume that a
proprietary variant of the code exists somewhere, and the authors hope
to merge back contributions into it, under the original non-copyleft
license.
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