On Tue, Apr 15, 2025 at 03:38:38PM +0200, Simon Josefsson wrote:
I believe that is a fairly new (~5 years?) approach within Debian.
Debian used to treat OpenSSL incompatible with GPLv2 and that all code
that link to OpenSSL has to have a GPL+OpenSSL exception. Does anyone
recall how and when this decision was made?
I think it was at least in part a pragmatic realization that debian was
being overly strict, as most other distributions (including those with
lawyers presumably incentivized to protect assets worth suing over) were
following a different interpretation.
FWIW, I think the current interpretation is much more in line with the
spirit of the text: we're not including openssl for the specific purpose
of linking to git; libssl is a part of the distribution that happens to
be pulled in (indirectly) when building git. It also seems not in
keeping with the spirit of the license that a completly non-free OS
linking non-free software would have fewer restrictions than a free OS
linking free software.
