On Wed, May 6, 2015 at 3:42 PM, Paul Jakma <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, 6 May 2015, Dave Taht wrote: > >> 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. > > > Except that two different lawyers I've had advice from say that babeld is > (or likely is, whatever) also subject to (or whatever the terminology is) > the GPL licence of those parts of Quagga that the Quagga-babeld port > builds/depends/derives on (again, whatever the right terminology is), and > that therefore the quagga-babeld port must be distributed in accordance with > the terms of the GPL. > > The first time we got legal advice it stated: "you're most likely going to > have to ship your modified babeld under GPL.". > > To my understanding, to ship software under the GPL means you must heed §1, > which requires GPL notices on the source code files. However, as that advice > wasn't explicit on that point, this point was unclear. I've since taken more > legal advice, which was more detailed and explicit, and says that if Quagga > ships the quagga-port of babeld those files which have been modified to > integrate libzebra functionality should have GPL notices. > > That is to say, my understanding is that Quagga is *required* to ship babeld > with GPL notices (least, the lawyers say we should).
It is remarkable how many oddities exist in licensing stuff that has never been tried in court, and there are sufficient exceptions to these rules in practice and in the field (in the linux kernel as one example, and in the common openssl exception elsewhere), for me to discount any (conservative) lawyer's opinion until the matter is actually decided in court. Which as very few GPLish things have ever been tried in court, will most likely never happen. > So we just can't do what Juliusz wants. > > We can delete babeld from Quagga and not ship it, though presumably that > wouldn't make Juliusz happy either. Nor I. However the continued availability of an obsolete and unmaintainable version of babel is a barrier to progress in the protocol elsewhere. I have no vote in this matter! (not being a copyright-holder), but as so far as I know the actual users of the quagga-babeld code borders on "none", and this dispute is unresolvable. Until such time as a purely GPL'd version of the babeld sources is created from scratch by someone with the chops to actually write it and maintain it, and no version of libzebra exists with a LGPL license, I think it would be best to remove babel entirely from quagga. > We can't ship it as Juliusz wants, because the lawyers I've asked to date > say we can't. > > That's the reality. > > regards, > -- > Paul Jakma [email protected] @pjakma Key ID: 64A2FF6A > Fortune: > "THIS time it really is fixed. I mean, how many times can we > get it wrong? At some point, we just have to run out of really > bad ideas.." > > - Linus Torvalds" -- 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
