Synaptics MIT license, again

[Graeme Gill]

Matthew Garrett wrote:
> Of course - or someone could provide some sort of argument more 
> compelling than "more people might possibly work on the driver". The 
> Synaptics driver isn't terribly important, but it's likely that there 
> are going to be more (L)GPL drivers appearing over time. If that 
> situation doesn't seem desirable, then people will actually have to make 
> some sort of statement as to why.

The general argument is that it's not nice to offer
contributions with a more (technically) restrictive
licence than the existing body of code being contributed to
(at least, not without agreement from the existing contributors),
since this potentially "poisons" the whole project with those
restrictions. The existing contributors may not have contributed
their code if they had known that such extra restrictions could
subsequently be applied.

The analogous situation would be someone contributing a driver
to the Linux kernel with a copyright license that added extra
restrictions (eg. "You can't run this on Sundays", or
"Not for commercial use").
Do you think such a contribution would be accepted ?

Graeme Gill.