Re: curl situation is intolerable
On 9/13/05, Peter Samuelson <peter@p12n.org> wrote:
>
> [Olaf van der Spek]
> > > I thought that if the interface matches the user can link whatever
> > > he wants, because he doesn't (re)distribute the results.
>
> [Steve Langasek]
> > There isn't universal agreement on this point, and it's never
> > actually been tested in court.
>
> There isn't? I thought this has been standard GPL lore for a very long
> time - if you link to an *interface* which has a GPL-compliant
> implementation, it does not matter if you also are incidentally runtime-
> compatible with a non-GPL-compatible implementation.
>
> Some have argued back and forth about how useful or bug-free the
> GPL-compliant implementation must be before it "counts", but that seems
> not to be an issue here - both SSL backends are said to be functional,
> if not 100% feature- and bug-equivalent.
>
> From a common-sense standpoint, it's pretty hard to argue that some
> software is "derived" from openssl if any user could run the same
> binary with only gnutls on his system.
The next question would then be: is it allowed to implement an
interface without that requireing anything of your license?
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