It seems a strange situation. Both packages have the same author. He chose MIT license for one and GPL for the other. He claims his lawyers told him this was

It seems a strange situation. Both packages have the same author. He chose MIT license for one and GPL for the other. He claims his lawyers told him this was OK, but in fact legal opinion is divided on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Linking_and_derived_works https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Lin... Of course, from his point of the view this really doesn't matter: he is the copyright holder of both packages and he can hardly violate his own copyright. The problem is for other people who might want to distribute modified copies of Capistrano under MIT but who can actually only do so under GPL. If he really does want the whole package to distributed as MIT with no ambiguity then the solution is simple: change the license of SSHKit to LGPL. If the company won't agree to that, then change it to GPL plus written exception that we won't sue you for linking to Capistrano. However, he could be deliberately sneaky. Tell people "our lawyers think this is OK, but check with your own lawyers". Then if any competitor does fork Capistrano and the fork becomes too successful he could say "whoops our lawyers have changed their mind, you've violated the GPL and we are now suing you."