On Tue, Apr 15, 2025 at 03:38:38PM +0200, Simon Josefsson wrote:
I believe that is a fairly new (~5 years?) approach within Debian. Debian used to treat OpenSSL incompatible with GPLv2 and that all code that link to OpenSSL has to have a GPL+OpenSSL exception. Does anyone recall how and when this decision was made?
I think it was at least in part a pragmatic realization that debian was being overly strict, as most other distributions (including those with lawyers presumably incentivized to protect assets worth suing over) were
following a different interpretation.FWIW, I think the current interpretation is much more in line with the spirit of the text: we're not including openssl for the specific purpose of linking to git; libssl is a part of the distribution that happens to be pulled in (indirectly) when building git. It also seems not in keeping with the spirit of the license that a completly non-free OS linking non-free software would have fewer restrictions than a free OS linking free software.