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Date: Wed, 08 May 2013 03:38:16 +0400
From: Alexander Cherepanov <cherepan@...me.ru>
To: john-dev@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: --fork

On 2013-05-08 00:26, Solar Designer wrote:
> As to a patch to a core file like this, this immediately brings up
> licensing concerns. %-)  I recall that you preferred to use GPLv2+ for
> rawSHA1_ng_fmt.c, and I respect that decision of yours, but for a core
> file I would not accept a GPL'ed change copyrighted by someone other
> than me.  I would also not want to relax the license to inc.c for the
> general public just yet (maybe later).  This means that accepting a
> patch to it gets tricky: we'd need to introduce some "license with right
> to sublicense" scheme (or copyright transfer, but I dislike that for a
> number of reasons).  I am to think of how to do this best and with
> minimal complexity for everyone; at this time, though, I merely need to
> push 1.8 out with its inc.c almost as-is.

Actually I don't see a problem here.

1. If you want sublicensing you can take MIT license -- it explicitly 
mentions permission to sublicense.

2. But I don't get why you definitely want sublicensing. Any permissive 
license should be enough, no? It would asymmetric -- you license a file 
to the world under GPL and a contributor licenses his contribution to 
you (or to the world) under a permissive license. Or put it another way: 
the contributor gives you permission to do some things with the 
derivative work under some conditions. There is no reason for these 
conditions to be the same as your conditions. For a third-party to do 
something with the derivative work it's necessary to meet his conditions 
and your conditions. And you can change you conditions (for new 
distribution) at will, independent of contributor's conditions. At least 
that's what I can say without rereading various documents.

-- 
Alexander Cherepanov

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