Re: no need to keep non-copylefted files that way in a copylefted project. (was Re: FRR package in Debian violates the GPL licence)
On Tue, Mar 19, 2019 at 05:28:05PM -0700, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote:
> 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.
I've probably been a bit unclear here. The request wasn't about the
code; they understand perfectly well that people can take their code and
pretty much do most things with it.
This was about them continuing to invest time into the code. It was
them who ported the code to make use of the Quagga/FRR infrastructure,
and they intended to continue maintaining, updating, and enhancing the
code inside Quagga/FRR.
[...]
> 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).
They're happy if someone proprietary takes up their code, but they won't
give /them/ any support. They would've been happy to work with us very
closely, but they do insist that their ongoing work is kept under the
license they have chosen (and which they have their reasons for.)
By relicensing their code to GPL, Quagga had essentially shunted itself
down to the position of any random proprietary relicensor.
> 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.
FWIW, in this case the OpenBSD people (where ldpd was taken from) were
more relaxed. But since we're having the discussion anyway for babeld
we might as well keep ldpd under its permissive license too.
> > P.S.: please Cc: me as I'm not subscribed to debian-legal.
>
> Done.
Thanks, you're the first person on this thread to do so :)
-David
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