David Lamparter wrote: > The respective original authors have expressed and reaffirmed their wishes > for the code to remain under a permissive license. . .. we have decided to > try and honour the original author's requests.
That's an odd request, since it contradicts the terms of the license they offered the code under originally. In fact, it's quite typical for projects to take non-copylefted code and bring it into a copylefted project and make copylefted changes thereafter. This has been in GCC, Linux, and many of the most famous copyleft projects in history. This is permitted and encouraged by non-copyleft FOSS licenses. Specifically, the original author's request, expressed through their choice of a non-copyleft license, was that downstream should have permission to relicense under nearly any sort of downstream licenses, including proprietary ones, so it seems to me that the authors are being a bit unfair to your copyleft project by making demands of you that they aren't (presumably) making of proprietary combiners of the code (i.e., if they didn't want the proprietary combiners to relicense under licenses other than theirs, they'd have used copyleft in the first place themselves). This is an example of a common trend I see: social pressure to keep non-copylefted code under non-copyleft licenses, sometimes even escalating to aggression (as the OpenBSD project did with Linux over wireless drivers), while permitting and even encouraging licensors to incorporate the code under proprietary licenses, which are much more restricted of copyleft. > P.S.: please Cc: me as I'm not subscribed to debian-legal. Done. -- Bradley M. Kuhn Pls. support the charity where I work, Software Freedom Conservancy: https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/
