Re: Unclear license situation in ruby1.8 (GPL, SSL, Ruby license)
Hi!
Lucas Nussbaum schrieb:
We (Ruby maintainers) are a bit confused by the situation of the ruby1.8
package. We think we are fine (the package has been in Debian for years,
has probably been reviewed by ftpmasters many times), but we are not
sure anymore why we are fine ;)
Even the ftp-team fails from time to time, but thanks for the confidence ;)
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?
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:
> 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?
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.
Best regards,
Alexander
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