Re: GPL and the "system library" exception

[Ansgar Burchardt <ansgar@debian.org>]

On Thu, 2019-03-21 at 10:04 +0100, Florian Weimer wrote:
> * Ansgar Burchardt:
> 
> > People have argued before that this applies to Debian.  In that
> > case
> > Debian wouldn't be able to distribute binaries of GPL-2-only
> > programs
> > linking against any GPL-3+ runtime libraries like libstdc++?  Or am
> > I
> > missing something?
> 
> Yes, I think we need the system library exception for distributing
> programs such as Git, which are GPLv2-only.

Git in Debian actually links (L)GPL-3+ libraries:

/usr/lib/git-core/git-remote-https links libtasn1.so.6; libtasn1.so.6
is distributed under non-trivial terms (according to its Debian
copyright file):

The library is licensed under LGPL-2+.1, but build scripts are licensed
under GPL-3+.  It cannot be distributed under the terms of the GPL-2 as
the GPL-2 requires the complete source to be distributed under terms
compatible with the GPL-2; "complete source" explicitly includes build
scripts.

So it looks to me like libtasn1.so.6 is effectively only distributable
under terms of the (L)GPL-3+, i.e. under terms incompatible with the
GPL-2 Git uses.

Ansgar