On Wed, 29 Apr 2015, Martin Winter wrote:
On Apr 29, 2015, at 4:09 AM, Paul Jakma <[email protected]> wrote:
On Wed, 29 Apr 2015, Paul Jakma wrote:
that babeld/ derives from libzebra. More recently I have had informal
legal advice that re-iterates that at least some of the files in
babeld/ must have GPL notices, e.g. files such as babel_zebra.c.
Oh, that answer was in the context of "Is it safe for Quagga to
distribute this with only an MIT/X11 licence notice or should it have a
GPL notice too?" as the question.
Unfortunately, this seems to be not that clear cut.
The first question is if this forces Babel (as the source) under GPL.
And there is where we got different legal advice. I’m not saying that
the legal advice from the past ws wrong, but that the lawyers seem to
disagree. It's’s sad if even lawyers disagree. But they if they would
agree they would put themselves out of business… (The 2nd question would
then be if babel needs a GPL notice as well)
Well, possibly you were asking a different question to me. ;)
The question I'm interested in is:
"What is the safe thing for Quagga to do, that ensures we meet all our
licence obligations".
I think the answer to this wrt babeld is pretty clear-cut, and you'll get
the same answer from most lawyers. Least, I've gotten what seems to be the
same answer 2/2 times.
I find it hard to understand why the discussion doesn't end there.
You could also ask:
"We want to distribute this code without GPL notices, is that OK?"
And here, yes, you could get different answers. Note that if one gets "No,
it's not OK" from one, that then going lawyer-shopping for the desired
answer may be a warning sign. ;)
Further, is that lawyer advising in the interests of Quagga or someone
else?
Personally, I have no clue who is right and even the lawyers seem to
disagree. Currently it seems it depends on whose lawyer you trust.
Well, I trust the solicitor I got my advice from. I instructed them to
advise me in the interests of Quagga. I tried to frame the query as
neutrally as possible and state both sides (though, of course I am biased)
- you've read the query - and they had no apriori knowledge of the
situation.
So the challenge is on how to pick a lawyer to trust or how to get
lawyers to agree (Maybe some of the question to the lawyer were not
clear enough and that’s why there were different answers?)
I don't see the challenge.
The Quagga maintainers got advice from SFLC in 2012 and discussed it quite
a bit. I don't have any reason to doubt that advice or to think we
interpreted it incorrectly, given other legal advice I've had.
We followed a reasonable process. We tried to do what was best and right
for _everyone_.
That one person who "doesn't care" about licensing is annoyed by that is
unfortunate, and I'm sorry about that. Again, I'm sure we'd accommodate
them as much as possible, within the constraints we have from the legal
advice that we have before us.
regards,
--
Paul Jakma [email protected] @pjakma Key ID: 64A2FF6A
Fortune:
Rule the Empire through force.
-- Shogun Tokugawa_______________________________________________
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