All contributions to inetutils are licensed under the GPL
It's common practice in GNU to keep the license of the original code, in
the spirit of allowing the original upstream authors to benefit from our
improvements. For example, rms specifically said that our changes to
firefox to make icecat should be under the same tri-license as firefox,
even though ordinarily he would not want to use the MPL for GNU
software.
`without fee', seems to mean that commercial distribution is not
allowed
No need to rewrite anything. As Ted surmised, the phrase means the
permissions are being granted without any payment necessary, rather than
saying that distribution for fee is forbidden.
Granted that the English can be interpreted in both ways, the former
(desired) interpretation is the intent and the lawyers gave it their
blessing.
