[py-dev] execnet / GPL licensing

[holger krekel]

Hi Robert, Armin, 

On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 12:05 -0500, Robert Kern wrote:
> On 2009-09-18 07:18 AM, Armin Rigo wrote:
> > Hi Holger,
> >
> > On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 03:07:58PM +0200, holger krekel wrote:
> >> my understanding: Your contributions - e.g. most of rsync.py -
> >> would remain MIT licensed.  Execnet distributed as a whole
> >> package could only be used under the GPL (if i GPL my parts
> >> and future work), however.  Does that match your understanding?
> >
> > I'm afraid not; I'm thinking notably about the reorganization of the
> > execnet code I did long ago (around r13661), which still leaves e.g. 109
> > lines from me in channel.py (30%).  I'm not really going to enforce my
> > position in any way because I'm happy to stick with old versions of
> > execnet for my own usage, but I'm just saying that I would informally
> > consider this as *slightly* unfair reuse of my part of the work.  Well,
> > you might want to investigate the position of other people too (e.g.
> > cfbolz and jan, who also have lines in channel.py).
> 
> MIT licensed code may be combined with GPLed code to make a combined work that 
> is distributed under the GPL. That's one of the things that you gave permission 
> for people to do when you licensed your code under the MIT license. Your MIT 
> license is still attached to your code, and Holger needs to make sure that he 
> maintains the correct attribution and MIT license statement for your and others' 
> code. Strictly speaking, he is not relicensing your code, just incorporating it 
> according to the very permissive terms that you granted him.

right, thanks for the clarification.  

However, i can see some slight unfairness because i am breaking the 
possible assumtion that not only my past but also my future 
work would be published without any restrictions. 

best,
holger