Re: GPL and the "system library" exception

[Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de>]

* 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.

libgcc is used at least on some platforms by Git.  Some people have
argued that the GCC run-time library exception

  <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gcc-exception.html

makes libgcc compatible with the GPL, version 2, but I really do not
see how this is the case.  The exception is pretty clear that libgcc
code remains covered by the GPL, version 3, I think.