It is with most extreme reluctance that I step into this fray, and although we (cerowrt) have been seeking legal advise on this issue, my argument is more practical.
It does no harm for quagga contributors to know that the babel subdirectory is covered by the original, simpler, vastly more permissive license. They can choose to work on it, or not. It does great harm for both present and future babel contributors for there to be a license different from the mainline code. It also impedes the standardization efforts in the ietf to have disjoint and out of date implementations of the core protocol, which may one day also be forked into more proprietary codebases, especially given how few are capable or have time to work on it. In olden days I would have encouraged fully separate implementations from ietf drafts under whatever licenses everybody wanted, but there are simply not enough people available to work on this stuff to have such separate efforts. So I strongly support removal of all the GPL copyright notices added to the quagga babel code, which was the case in the original merge request that the latest patchset is based on. On Wed, Apr 29, 2015 at 11:50 PM, Martin Winter <[email protected]> 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) > > Please keep in mind that this is about the source distributions. Binaries > with babel will be clearly under GPL (at least I think everyone agrees here) > > Background on the GPL issue here: > > One view (which Paul mentioned) is that there are some files in babel which > use libzebra. As libzebra is GPL, this would make babel (or at least part of > it) GPL as well. > Or in short, it makes it a derivate. > > The opposing view is based that there is a babel which can be run outside > Quagga (the standalone version) and the connections to libzebra are only > there to make it interoperate with quagga. Some lawyers argue that this would > not qualify for making it a derivate. API connections like these to just make > things interoperate are excluded. > > 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. > > 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?) > > Regards, > > - Martin Winter > > > > _______________________________________________ > Quagga-dev mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.quagga.net/mailman/listinfo/quagga-dev -- Dave Täht Open Networking needs **Open Source Hardware** https://plus.google.com/u/0/+EricRaymond/posts/JqxCe2pFr67 _______________________________________________ Quagga-dev mailing list [email protected] https://lists.quagga.net/mailman/listinfo/quagga-dev
