Re: GPL (was Re: [Lynx-dev] text browsing)

[David Woolley]

> That would, I guess, be UKansas and a few individuals.

Including important contributors who are no longer traceable, 
like Foteos.  A long time ago the FSF wanted Lynx to have the
copyrights assigned to single organisation.  It couldn't be
done then, because it was impossible to track down everyone
and get agreement.

You would also have to remove GPLed code from other libraries,
e.g. is GNU gettext being used for the internationalisation?

Once you had permission from all the copyright owners of GPLed code,
you wouldn't actually need to remove the GPL; what you would need to
do is give an additional permission on all the GPLed code to allow it
to be linked with OpenSSL.  The conflict that arises is because
OpenSSL imposes an additional restriction (an advertising clause).
The GPL doesn't allow, for reasons wholly predictable from the policy
behind it, additional restrictions, but it allows additional 
permissions.

Incidentally, I suspect an anti-FSF or anti-copyright line from one
contributor to this thread.  For clarification of what I've written,
there is no doubt that distributing an OpenSSL binary for Windows
is a copyright infringement.  The area where they may (but also might
not) be a conflict between letter and spirit is where either an
incomplete product is supplied, with the intention that the recipient
links with an incompatible library, or a complete product is provided
but with such a poor implementation of the library that most reasonable
people would be forced to replace it with the incompatible one.

Where one usually sees this brinkmanship is when someone wants to make
a profit from open source code without contributing back fully.