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

[David Lamparter]

(This is kinda duplicate because Paul said more or less the same things)

On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 05:12:24PM +0200, Gabriel Kerneis wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 09:53:59AM -0500, Pieter Hintjens wrote:
> > On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 9:26 AM, Juliusz Chroboczek <jch at pps.jussieu.fr> wrote:
> > 
> > > Paul Jakma has added GPL headers to the babeld code that he has merged
> > > into Quagga. Â This was done against the wishes of Matthieu Boutier and
> > > myself, the main two authors of this code, and without the knowledge of
> > > the other authors.
> > 
> > If you publish your code under MIT/X11 you explicitly grant others the
> > right to do this.
> 
> 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?

They apply to distributions of the code made from Quagga checkouts.
The addition of the GPL headers was made because libzebra is GPL and
quagga-babeld probably "derives" (in a legal sense) from libzebra.
Therefore, libzebra's GPL forces GPL onto quagga-babeld.

Note that we (the quagga maintainers) have made clear that we will only
accept patches to quagga-babeld if the author accepts releasing them as
MIT/X11. This is stated in:
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=quagga.git;a=blob;f=babeld/LICENCE;h=9da569dc28bc29673d280276d720edbeab5c3038;hb=81c3e5006e5d29e305cbc0ab482617d7e570e8c0
  29 Contributors to the code in babeld/ are asked to make their work available
  30 under the same MIT/X11 licence as given immediately above. Please indicate
  31 your assent to this by updating this file and appending the appropriate

This basically amounts to dual-licensing quagga-babeld as MIT/GPL. All
contributions come with the "OK" for MIT license; it is only the GPL
inheritance from libzebra that leaves quagga-babeld as GPL in the end.

We did not make this decision lightly; it is purely motivated out of our
legal consideration that libzebra is GPL and quagga-babeld is probably
not allowed to link to it unless it is GPL too. We (and especially I)
tried very hard to avoid this, but we were unable to get legal safety to
an acceptable degree. And, well, we need to be on the safe side
ourselves, and this is the safe side...


-David