Note that the complaint is not about not being able to rewrite the code. It's done by a Debian maintainer of a piece of software that depends in weirdly-licensed code; and there are many of them. While sometimes Debian packages are modified to remove files that are not eligible for redistribution, in this case the maintainers would have to rewrite larger parts to make them DFSG-compatible.

This only leads to more fragmentation and bad relations between Debian and upstream.