Can GPLed programs use Heimdal?

[Sam Hartman <hartmans@debian.org>]

[please respect mail-followup-to and keep debian-kerberos copied]

Hi.  We're working on some consensus guidelines among the Kerberos
maintainers to help packagers who want to add Kerberos support to
their packages.  A legal question has come up.

The Heimdal implementation links against libssl in order to get its
crypto.  How does this effect GPLed applications?  Note that the
applications do not normally call any routines from libssl; they only
call Heimdal routines indirectly.

Another thing that may make this different than the standard libssl
linking question is that there are multiple implementations of
Kerberos.  The APIs are not the same so some applications only work
with Heimdal, but other applications work both with Heimdal and the
MIT implementation.  Is the existence of another implementation enough
to allow us to ignore the libssl dependency and link against Heimdal?

Thanks,

--Sam