On 16.04.25 07:27, Simon Josefsson wrote:
I think the idea behind the "proprietary system library" GPL exception is to make it possible to distribute GPL binaries linked to non-free system libraries on systems where that is pretty much unavoidable,
which, if you remove the "proprietary" and "non-free" wording which was unavoidable when the GPL was written but isn't nowadays, is exactly what we have here: it's pretty much unavoidable for nontrivial programs to somehow link to libraries with "incompatible" licenses.
I thus move that we declare every library that supplies basic features (nowadays SSL certainly counts as such) to a widely disparate cabal of applications (ditto) to be a System Library.
*Nobody* is going to go after Debian with a demand to stop doing such linking, much less demand compensation of any damages. If anybody ever does, well, we can discuss how to fix the problem then, **along with pretty much every other distro out there**. This is not a Debian specific problem.
Going out of our way to pro-actively kowtow[1] to barely-understood legalese (we all are not lawyers, up to and including the FTP team) is not The Way. Neither is crippling some features of git, or whichever else program du jour has this problem.
NB no it's not possible to re-license git to GPLv3. That'd be only slightly less difficult as re-licensing the Linux kernel.
[1] "to show obsequious deference"* * -- -- mit freundlichen Grüßen -- -- Matthias Urlichs
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