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Re: Bug#979095: Legally problematic GPL-3+ readline dependency



Thank you for filing this bug report.

Adding debian-legal to see if there's anyone with a good recommendation
to this mess.

On Sat, 2021-01-02 at 18:36 +0100, Bastian Germann wrote:
> Package: multipath-tools
> Severity: important
> 
> This package depends on libreadline8 which is GPL-3+ licensed.
> According 
> to debian/copyright parts of your package are GPL-2-only licensed. If
> that is also (transitively) the case for the binaries that link with 
> libreadline.so.8 it might be legally problematic (see 
> https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AllCompatibility).
> 

multipath-tools is mixed bag of licenses. The last time I checked on
it, the results weren't optimum.

https://www.redhat.com/archives/dm-devel/2016-July/msg00508.html

> There is an easy solution to the problem: Replacing the build
> dependency 
> libreadline-dev with libeditreadline-dev links with the BSD-licensed 
> libedit library which is a readline replacement.

Thanks for the input. Lets see what best way to handle this.

I personally would prefer to stick with the GNU Readline library but
that is just a personal preference and not a strong opinion.

I see there's a GPL2 variant of the library but under the Debian QA
Group. And the last upload to the package is from 2015

Fedora (not that I treat their judgment as the right thing) is linking
to GNU Readline 8. Not sure if Ubuntu is doing anything different.
https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/rpminfo?rpmID=23332353


Please do feel free to raise the severity, in case you do not see any
progress on this bug report, over time.


Thanks,
Ritesh

-- 
Ritesh Raj Sarraf | http://people.debian.org/~rrs
Debian - The Universal Operating System

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