Apparently SSL support will be disabled in future Mutt packages due to yet another GPL-incompatibility problem.
You all know the sort of problem: according to some people's understanding of the GPL and copyright law, GPL software X cannot be linked with GPL-incompatible software Y and then distributed even if X and Y are separate works in separate packages. No doubt some people approve of this, but I think there are a lot of people who would prefer to apply a milder form of copyleft to their programs. How should they do this? Invent yet another licence? I hope not. Find an alternative licence? I don't know of one. I think my ideal licence would be somewhere between the GPL and the LGPL. Use the GPL with some additional permission? This is the possibility I'm thinking about. What I would like to do is add some wording that has the effect of making the GPL apply only to what you would normally call a derived work and not to entirely separate works that happen to be linked with that work. Perhaps someone can advise me whether the following paragraph, inserted after the paragraph that says "This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License ..." would have the right effect, or maybe someone can suggest a neater formulation. In addition to the permissions in the GNU General Public Licence, if this software forms part of a program or library ("this work") then you may compile and link this work with other programs or libraries ("the other works") and distribute the resulting program or library in object code or executable form under the terms of version 2 of the GNU General Public Licence with the additional special exception to Section 3 of that licence that the source code distributed need not include the source code for the other works, provided that this work can reasonably be considered an independent and separate work from the other works and that the other works can reasonably be considered independent and separate works from this work. Edmund (Is this off-topic? I don't think so. If Debian could come up with a milder form of copyleft, people like the Mutt developers would probably be happy to apply it, and then Debian would suffer less from GPL-incompatibility problems, so Debian would benefit.)