This one time, at band camp, Thomas Bushnell BSG said: > Stephen Gran <sgran@debian.org> writes: > > > This one time, at band camp, Thomas Bushnell BSG said: > >> Anyhow, the point is that certain GPLd programs have special > >> exceptions that allow them to be linked with openssl. However, note > >> that *all* the GPL'd code in the final program must have the > >> exception. > >> > >> For example, gwenhywfar is a library which contains the exception and > >> which uses openssl, but that doesn't solve the gnucash problem, where > >> we want to link gnucash against this library. We can't do that, > >> because gnucash and gnome don't have the exception. > > > > But that's transitive linking. If gnucash doesn't have libssl in it's > > NEEDED section, or directly reference any symbols from libssl itself, is > > this really an issue? I understand we can't distribute statically > > linked copies of gnucash, but we don't do that, AFAIK. > > The GPL Compliance Lab was asked about exactly this question. Can you provide a pointer to the discussion? I am curious to read it, if possible. Of course, if it's just in one of your mbox's, don't worry about it. > The fact that this is transitive linking means that it is perfectly > legal to distribute gnucash *source*. ENOPARSE, sorry. I can't imagine how it _could_ affect the source, since the source doesn't link to anything - it's just a build system and source code. > It doesn't affect the binaries at all. Again, parse problem. What is 'it' in this context? The GPL? The exception? Or are you saying they thought transitive links to GPL incompatible software violates the GPL? I am assuming you meant the last statement, but your brevity left me unclear. And if so, why? I thought that I had read somewhere that the standard advice for making a non-free application talk to a GPL library was through a 'shim' library, so that the symbols aren't loaded together in a non-free/GPL incompatible application. (Of course, I can't immediately find the link to this advice right now. Irritating) Isn't that roughly the same as transitive linking? Just curious, -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- | ,''`. Stephen Gran | | : :' : sgran@debian.org | | `. `' Debian user, admin, and developer | | `- http://www.debian.org | -----------------------------------------------------------------
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