Quoting Bryan Ruby <bryan@cmsreport.com>:
The issue though comes down to whether Drupal.org has a vested interest in protecting its license and ultimately the community's own software. In many countries, the history of how an organization protects its copyright, trademarks, licenses, and other intellectual property is significant in determining who has ultimate ownership. If Drupal.org allows itself to distribute modules that are known to contain code that is not compatible (subject to debate I know) with the GPL license then in practice Drupal.org is not enforcing it's own license. Down the road a company could redistribute modified version of Drupal claiming and claim they are under no obligation to "give back" to the community due to Drupal.org's own historical lack of enforcing the GPL. At least that's how I interpret in a non-lawyer way the main concern if Drupal.org continues the way it goes it how it handles contributed modules.
I suggest a disclaimer statement on the drupal.org/project/Modules and drupal.org/project/Themes pages that state that the modules and themes are a Drupal community contribution that are not maintained by Drupal.org but are permitted to be distributed by Drupal.org. Each module and theme must be licensed with GPL and it is the module maintainer's responsibility to ensure that any third party application, library, module, etc is compliant with the GPL. Drupal.org itself discourages the distribution of third party libraries that are not GPL compliant via its distribution methods but there is no method in place to enforce it beyond email complaint from the third party library owners or by the Drupal community. Such a statement clearly separates core from the contributions but also separates the individual modules to its maintainers. Then we can end this debate of how contributed modules affect the whole even though "These contributed modules are not part of any official release and may not be optimized or work correctly." tries to do that now. IANAL, Earnie -- http://for-my-kids.com/ -- http://give-me-an-offer.com/