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Re: Bug#218832: ITP: libnettle -- a low-level cryptographic library



On Thu, Nov 06, 2003 at 05:21:59PM -0500, John Belmonte scribbled:
> Marek Habersack wrote:
> >Quoting from the nettle manual:
> >
> > Nettle is distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) (see the
> > file COPYING for details). However, most of the individual files are dual
> > licensed under less restrictive licenses like the GNU Lesser General 
> > Public
> > License (LGPL), or are in the public domain. This means that if you don't
> > use the parts of nettle that are GPL-only, you have the option to use the
> > Nettle library just as if it were licensed under the LGPL. To find the
> > current status of particular files, you have to read the copyright notices
> > at the top of the files. 
> 
> The upstream author can make this statement because people compiling the 
> library can go into the makefile and disable various (say GPL) source 
> files and prevent them from being included in the library, thus 
> producing a library file that is (for example) under the LGPL.
> 
> However in your package, assuming it is compiling GPL'd modules and 
> including them in the library, is producing an object file governed by 
> the terms of the GPL.  Therefore your license field should read only "GPL".
Users still have a choice of using only the non-GPL parts of the library by
linking with the static version of the lib and pulling only the non-GPL
objects from there.

marek

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