[Babel-users] Babeld merged with GPL headers against copyright holders' wishes

[Pieter Hintjens]

On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 10:12 AM, Gabriel Kerneis
<kerneis at pps.jussieu.fr> wrote:

> IANAL, but I fail to see how someone who is *not* the copyright holder might
> have any right to add restrictions whatsoever on a piece of code.  Only the
> copyright holder can decide the licence of their code.
>
> And if the additional GPL headers do not apply to Juliusz's and Matthieu's code,
> then what do they apply to and what is the point in adding them?

The primary reason for using MIT/X11/BSD is precisely to allow others
to *relicense* the code as they wish. Thus, I can take pieces (whole
or in part) into my closed projects, licensed commercially. Or, into
my GPL projects, licensed under GPLv3.

If you do not want to offer people this freedom, simply use a more
precise license. But you cannot (this is weirdly ironic) try to grant
specific freedoms to commercial software developers but not to free
software developers.

You could of course write a license saying, "this software can be used
in any project except a GPL one" and that'd be entirely legal. You are
after all the copyright holder. You can restrict relicensing of your
code. But you cannot change your mind *after* you have granted a
license to the world on your code.

-Pieter