Re: GPL-licensed packages with depend-chain to OpenSSL

[Glenn Maynard <glenn@zewt.org>]

On Fri, Sep 10, 2004 at 06:16:51PM -0400, Raul Miller wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 10, 2004 at 05:40:00PM -0400, Glenn Maynard wrote:
> > Huh?  Are you claiming that the OS exception doesn't allow linking against
> > GPL-incompatible system libraries?
> 
> It's meaningless to ask that question without specifying who is doing
> the linking and who provided those libraries.  The answer is different
> depending on who...

Microsoft creates a system library, MSVCRT (Microsoft Visual C runtime),
which is used by almost all binaries which run on Windows.  It's GPL-
incompatible.[1]

John creates Emacs.

I compile Emacs in VC, to run in Windows.  The result is a binary which
uses an GPL-incompatible system C library.

I believe the OS exception in the GPL allows me to distribute that binary,
but disallows Microsoft from distributing it along with Windows.

You claim that linking against that library counts as "accompanies", which
would prohibit the above.

(On careful re-reading of the exception, I'm not completely sure whether
the exception allows this or not: it exempts me from needing to provide source
for those libraries, but I'm not sure if it exempts it from compatibility.
I'll probably ask the FSF, since this is a critical question.)

Regardless of that, if linking counts as "accompanies", this exception
would be a complete no-op, and you'd have to distribute the glibc source
along with every GPL application that links against glibc.

[1] actually, I'm not absolutely sure of this because I can't find the
redistributables license, but there are plenty of other libraries in this
class on Windows, so I'm assuming it for the sake of discussion

-- 
Glenn Maynard