Re: [Pan-devel] OpenSSL and the GPL: License problems

[walt]

On 12/18/2011 10:15 AM, Duncan wrote:

<wholesale snippage with apologies to Duncan's carpal tunnels>

> But for binary distros including both the big guys like Fedora and
> Ubuntu, and binary-based distros based on source-based distros like
> Sabayon (based on Gentoo), it's an ENTIRELY different matter!  They won't
> be able to ship pan binaries with OpenSSL support as that'd violate pan's
> GPL, which is the only thing giving them the legal right to distribute
> pan binaries.

I just booted up my virtualbox install of kubuntu to see how they handle
this problem.  (I use it just to keep up
 with kde's changes.)

For example, they install a binary package of openssl (as I suspect most
other binary distributions do also) and they include a file named
/usr/share/doc/openssl/copyright.bz2
which contains a copy of the openssl credits demanded by the license.

Couldn't they also install such a file in /usr/share/doc/pan to satisfy
the openssl license?  I don't know what other binary distros do about
their packages that use openssl.

I know that you know that all the BSD's would be up shit creek without
gcc and the autotools, so I don't think they have much room to complain,
really.

In Real Life, isn't the whole fuss really about linking to closed-source
binaries?

I've been reading mailing list threads about GPL issues for years and
I still don't really understand what they're arguing about :-/