Re: LGPL v3 compatibilty
On Mon, Jul 16, 2007 at 08:39:10AM +0100, Måns Rullgård <mans@mansr.com> wrote:
> Walter Landry <walter@geodynamics.org> writes:
>
> > Francesco Poli <frx@firenze.linux.it> wrote:
> >> On Sat, 14 Jul 2007 21:56:27 -0700 (PDT) Walter Landry wrote:
> >>
> >> > Francesco Poli <frx@firenze.linux.it> wrote:
> >> > > On Mon, 2 Jul 2007 12:31:13 -0400 Anthony Towns wrote:
> >> > >
> >> > > [...]
> >> > > > Note that _if_ we do stick to the view we've taken up until now,
> >> > > > when we have a LGPLv3 only glibc in the archive, we'll no longer
> >> > > > be able to distribute GPLv2-only compiled executables.
> >> > >
> >> > > Unless the GPLv2-only work copyright holder(s) add(s) a special
> >> > > exception, similar to the one needed to link with the OpenSSL
> >> > > library, right?
> >> > >
> >> > > This scenario is worrying me... :-(
> >> >
> >> > Is this going to be a problem for the kernel? It is definitely not
> >> > going to go to GPLv3.
> >>
> >> Is the Linux kernel linked with any LGPL'd work?
> >> AFAIUI, it is not, so no problem for the kernel.
> >
> > Doesn't the kernel get its implementations for pow(), sqrt(),
> > printf(), and the rest of the C standard library from glibc, which is
> > LGPL'd?
>
> No. The kernel is completely self-contained. Some code may of course
> have been borrowed from glibc at some point, but that's irrelevant.
Borrowed code *is* relevant, because you can't borrow code *and* change its
license without authorization. What makes it irrelevant is that the
borrowed code is LGPL'ed. And LGPL code can happily be relicensed to GPL,
as stated in the LGPL text. Thus the kernel code that was borrowed from
glibc is GPL.
Mike
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