First, mandatory disclaimer: IANAL, so this is only an interpretation in general terms, not advice to anyone, for which they'd have to consult a lawyer. This being said... The last "obviously" is not so obvious: since committers have had to agree to only submitting code to be distributed by d.o. under GPLv2, everything they commit will be distributed by d.o. under that license. But it does not prevent *additional* licenses to be available for the same code, as long as they are compatible with the GPLv2. Case in point: my own modules are originally created and distributed under the CeCILL 2.0, because the GPL has various issues under french law. According to both the FSF and the CeCILL authors, both licenses are compatible with each other, so no incompatibility arises. Details at: http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses#CeCILL http://www.cecill.info/licences.en.html Now, since I commit this code to d.o., I have to make it available from d.o. under the GPLv2 (actually: licensing it to d.o. under the GPLv2), because this is a prerequisite to be allowed to commit there. As a consequence, any user obtaining the code from d.o. obtains it under both licenses, at his choice: the GPLv2, available for everything downloaded from d.o. due the requirement on committers, or CeCILLv2, because an *additional* compatible license to GPLv2 has been specified in the module files. This is only possible because the license are compatible, otherwise this would be a violation of the GPL and possibly of the other license, but any user will probably want to use the product under the CeCILL because it is better for them. There's a rather good explanation on wikipedia, even better than on the very site of the CeCILL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CeCILL#CeCILL_version_2 The same dual (or even multiple) licensing mechanism would work with any GPL-compatible license. Not there are that many available, actually... So code released under a non-GPL license can be checked into Drupal's CVS repository, as long as: - it is also released under the GPL - the other license does not prevent it. FGM ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jeff Eaton" <jeff@viapositiva.net> To: <development@drupal.org> Sent: Thursday, August 30, 2007 4:32 PM Subject: Re: [development] Modules that integrate non-GPL PHP apps violatethe GPL. [...]
So, for example, it would be perfectly legal to create a Drupal theme that consists of nothing but images and CSS files (using drupal 6's new .info file format) and release it under a non-GPL license. Obviously, it couldn't be checked into Drupal's CVS repository in that case.
--Jeff