Re: distinguishing between actual AGPL3 vs proprietary relicensing?

[Andrew Cagney <andrew.cagney%gmail.com@localhost>]

On 26 January 2017 at 17:04, Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg%bec.de@localhost> wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 26, 2017 at 08:24:41AM -0500, Greg Troxel wrote:
>> Seeing the discussion about db6 and AGPGL3 reminded me that there are
>> two styles of programs under AGPL3 and that pkgsrc doesn't distinguish
>> between them.
>
> No, it doesn't matter. The AGPL3 is not a FOSS license, even part of it
> is "GPL". It doesn't matter if you can also buy a commerical license.
> It's not like you couldn't go to the FSF and ask them for a commerical
> license for GCC (whether or not they could agree is again beyond the
> scope). The point of the license tagging if there ever was one is to
> make sure that problematic packages are tagged. The mechanism does that.
> Making it more complicated doesn't change anything, beyond adding
> complexity.

Right.  They are orthogonal issues.

- the licence, if a package is released as AGPL3 then that package is
AGPL3, end of story.  If someone wants to mix and match package
licences then they get to pretend they are to lawyers.

- upstream policy, for instance, from the pov of pkgsrc and its
contributors, what barriers are there to having a local fix accepted
upstream

The answers to the second quickly get really esoteric and are probably
better left vague.