Claus Färber wrote:
the author put it under the GPL because he *didn't* want it shipped with software with restrictions like OpenSSL's.I see: Someone releasing a program written in curl under the GPL does not want it to be distributed along with an operating system that includes the curl runtime.
Curl is a downloading API, not a programming language. You mean 'written using curl', surely?
Oh, you mean like the curl library linked with and without libSSL? Many programs written using curl don't access the SSL functions of it at all. It is hard to be sure whether any given program that doesn't use ssl was written against curl+ssl (and therefore explicitly permitting such linkage), or against a curl without ssl (at best not implicitly permitting such linkage, and at worst expressly forbidding it).No, most authors would probably be very surprised that there is such a problem at all. Of course, in such simple cases, they can be thought of having given implicit permission to link against OpenSSL. The hard cases are those where you have different choices for a library and only one choice links against a non-GPL-compatible library.
-- Lewis Jardine IANAL IANADD