Re: Transitive closure of licenses
Glenn Maynard wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 23, 2002 at 06:09:38PM -0500, Jeff Licquia wrote:
>> It's not so hard to imagine a similar situation outside of TeX-world.
>> To quote a recently seen example:
>>
>> nautilus -> libgnomevfs0
>>
>> If you rebuild libgnomevfs0 and link it to OpenSSL, then you change
>> the license status of nautilus. Think libgnomevfs0 as "A" and
>> nautilus as "B".
>
> That's due to changes in license relationships, though, not due to
> features being added or removed. I can still make whatever feature
> changes I want to OpenSSL without changing the freeness of libgnomevfs0
> or nautilus.
It's due to adding an "SSL_initialize()" feature to libgnomevfs.
In fact, this sort of violation would occur even if SSL_initialize() is
never called. If the link command for libgnomevfs includes -lOpenSSL (or
whatever), then the same license violation occurs.
So, with the GPL you can make NO modifications to what normal people would
consider the "source" (add LD_FLAGS=-lOpenSSL to your environment and build
with pristine source) and you can render Free Software license-incompatible
with other Free Software.
--Joe
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