Re: GnuTLS in Debian
Vincent Lefevre <vincent@vinc17.net> writes:
> On 2013-12-30 10:57:32 -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> Most upstream authors that I've spoken with don't believe that
>> licensing crosses the shared library ABI boundary, that the shared
>> OpenSSL library and the GPLv2 program that calls it remain separate
>> works, and therefore there is no need for OpenSSL to meet the GPLv2
>> requirements since the binary as distributed is not a derivative work
>> of both projects. Instead, the projects are combined at runtime by the
>> end user, who doesn't have to meet any redistributability requirements
>> of either license.
> I suppose that this is allowed only if when compiling the GPLv2
> program against OpenSSL, inline functions from OpenSSL (if there
> are ones) are not included in the GPLv2 program.
Or if those inline functions are not copyrightable, which may be the case
for some trivial pieces of code. Yes.
I'm therefore a lot more dubious of this argument for C++ libraries, since
with C++ it's common for substantial chunks of library code to end up
inlined in the binary that includes its headers.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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