On Wed, May 6, 2015 at 1:33 PM, Greg Troxel <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Dave Taht <[email protected]> writes:
>
>> 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 out of date implementations of the core protocol, which may one day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.
>
> Convenience to people who want to use code has no bearing on what is
> proper. Removing all the GPL licenses from Linux would make it easier
> for people to create proprietary derived works, and surely you would not
> suggest that to be a reasonable course of action.
No I would not! Each bit of GPL licensed code in linux is owned by
individual contributors and is either a derivative work, or comes with
explicit license grants and/or exceptions, in it by the authors.
1) The quagga/babel dispute is about a non-core-babel-contributor
slapping an additional GPL license on top of code that was contributed
by it's core contributors under a much simpler and weaker license,
totally upwardly compatible with the GPL, with a nearly a straight
one-for-one transliteration of the very few calls in the code to call
into the libzebra library.
Whether or not this converts the entire babel codebase into GPL
license is seemingly a matter for lawyers to decide, which neither
this project nor mine can afford.
No-one disputes that the binary product as a whole is gpled. My
practical point is that no harm is committed by quagga having code in
it that is under the original, more permissive, non-infectious
license, and great harm, thus far, in the ill-advised relicensing
attempt.
1) On the relicensing front, for example recently I obtained
permission from fq_codel's designer to allow dual licensing some of
his core code and
ideas from GPL to dual GPL/BSD. I am not suggesting that libzebra take
this (or LGPL) approach, but it is one way out of this mess. I am
painfully aware of how difficult it is to gain the consent of all
authors to relicense code, whether it be from babel's original license
to GPL, or from GPL to something else.
I note that I have a song about this sort of stuff ("It gpls me")...
which is partially a complaint about the length of copyright, and I
have released many things under many different licenses ranging from
free as in beer to affero GPLv3 (gnugol), and as an author, am always
open to negotiation.
richard long ago gave me permission to sing that song... under the
comedic license.
>
> The question remains what's legally appropriate, in terms of respecting
> the license of the code from Zebra, and the social norms within and open
> source project.
It is about *mutual* license respect for all copyright holders.
If the quagga project as a whole believes it should relicense all code
it acquires to GPL - and judging from some recent commits, that seems
to be the case unless the author makes an explicit exception in the
commit? - then there will be grounds for multiple further legal
disputes left unsolved without legal aid, discussing the terms of the
copyright and licensing infringements on those other codebases this
will entail.
So there seems to be a policy like this *now* more fully expressed, so
that future potential contributors to this version of the quagga
codebase know exactly what they are getting into...
... but as for me and cerowrt, I think it would be more productive -
and safer - for me to resume work in one of the many quagga forks that
exist, if I find time to do so.
I would dearly prefer to see the quagga core gain source specific
routing for more of it's core protocols (under GPL and libzebra
support), and for me to be able to cleanly migrate mind and code
between the mainline babel codebase and this (under the original
license). My brain can handle the distinction between these two kinds
of contributions quite cleanly, where the current situation is
impossible to deal with.
--
Dave Täht
Open Networking needs **Open Source Hardware**
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+EricRaymond/posts/JqxCe2pFr67
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