Re: Debian readline/libedit breakage

On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 11:06 PM, <Charles(dot)McDevitt(at)emc(dot)com> wrote:
> The GNU people will never be 100% satisfied by anything you do to psql, other than making it GPL.
> Readline is specifically licensed in a way to try to force this (but many disagree with their ability to force this).

This is just libelous FUD. There's absolutely no reason postgres would
have to be GPL'd to satisfy any library license. In fact doing so
would make the problem worse, not better since then the license on
Postgres itself would (allegedly) conflict with the OpenSSL license.

There's no question that the resulting binary when linked with
readline is covered by the GPL including shipping source code etc.
This is non-controversial and the
original intent of licensing readline under the GPL. This isn't the
same question as GIMP plugins or code using GMP which are themselves
functionally dependent on the GPL'd code and some claim are therefore
derivative works. I don't think anyone would
claim that Postges is a derivative work of readline.

The only question here is whether the OpenSSL license imposes
requirements which cannot be met at the same time as the GPL
requirements. The rest of Postgres itself doesn't conflict but if
you're distributing a binary then you're covered by all the licenses
of the code you include and depend on (the last part is somewhat
controversial but irrelevant to this topic since OpenSSL headers are
already included). So if the OpenSSL license imposes restrictions that
the GPL bars then the resulting binary is not distributable.

I suspect RedHat may have determined that the OpenSSL license
requirements are not in fact mutually exclusive with the GPL either
because they're not enforceable at all in the US anyways or because
the way they read them they can be satisfied without violating the
GPL. It's also possible they just decided it's unlikely the OpenSSL
people would ever sue or the damages would be negligable. Of course
this is all speculation.

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greg