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Re: Unclear license situation in ruby1.8 (GPL, SSL, Ruby license)



On 19/03/10 at 17:27 +0100, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl wrote:
> >Ruby is licensed under the Ruby license, or GPLv2. The exact terms for
> >the choice are:
> >Ruby is copyrighted free software by Yukihiro Matsumoto
> ><matz@netlab.jp>.  You can redistribute it and/or modify it under either
> >the terms of the GPL version 2 (see the file GPL), or the conditions
> >below:
> >[ Ruby license ]
> 
> No linking exception for linking ruby gpl-code with openssl?

Unfortunately no.

> My understanding is as follow:  As you use libreadline, which is
> GPLed, we ship ruby under the term of the GPL anyway.  So we would
> need the link exception, wouldn't we?
> 
> So, now let's assume, we get that from the ruby folks:

We will do our best to get an exception before the release.

Now, what if we don't? Are such problems considered RC, or just "it's
not legally safe, but it's a risk we could take"?

> > When building ruby, two interesting extensions (separate .so files)
> > are built.
> > - readline.so is built by linking with libreadline5 (GPLv2)
> > - openssl.so is built by linking with openssl.
> [..]
> >Questions:
> >1/ Can we ship those files?
> > 2/ Can we ship those files in the same binary package?
> 
> I think so, yes.  As we don't ship code, which links to both,
> libreadline and openssl, do we?

No, no code linked to both.

> >3/ Can we distribute a ruby application that "require" (that's the ruby
> >keyword for loading libraries) both readline and openssl?
> 
> I think we can do this, too.  TTBOMK ruby code is interpreted at
> runtime, isn't it?  So with such an application, we again don't ship
> code that is linked to both libreadline and openssl.

Yes, everything happens at runtime (no bytecode, etc).
-- 
| Lucas Nussbaum
| lucas@lucas-nussbaum.net   http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/ |
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