* Richard Fontana: > On Thu, Mar 30, 2017 at 05:08:24AM +0200, Carlos Alberto Lopez Perez wrote: > >> Do you (or anyone else) _really_ think the copyright holders of the GPL >> program in question had any intention ever of not allowing their program >> to be used along with OpenSSL, when they where the ones implementing >> support for using it on the first place? > > This, I would say, encapsulates the real Fedora/Red Hat position on > this issue to the extent there is one. It assumes that the intent of > the copyright holders can be determined from their actions.
But it's not clear that applies when at the time the software was released by upstream, the libraries were GPLv2-compatible, and we started linking against GPLv2-incompatible versions only later. This has already happened with readline (GPLv3 and later), and libgcc (GPLv3 and later with GCC exception). It was avoided for GMP, which used to be LGPLv2+, briefly LGPLv3+, and finally GPLv2 or LGPLv3+. You could argue that if upstream continues to make compatibility fixes for later readline versions, or enable compiling with later GCC versions, they give implied permission to link with those GPLv2-incompatible library versions. But I think this argument breaks down, at least formally, when there are many copyright holders, and not everyone contributes to the changes that enable this kind of forward compatibility (first technically, and then implicitly license-wise). On the other hand, when a larger upstream project granted us a linking exception for OpenSSL, they probably did not obtain consent from all the copyright holders, either. What really annoys me about this whole situation is this: I think no one presently argues that the GPLv2 prevents people from distributing pre-built binaries for proprietary operating systems. I can take Hotspot (a component of OpenJDK which is GPLv2-only), compile it with Microsoft Visual Studio, and distribute the result. But I suddenly can't ship pre-built binaries, as a free software distribution, because I happen to have upgraded the system compiler past GCC 4.2, thus got the new GPLv3+ license for libgcc, and can't link GPLv2-only Hotspot against that anymore. This can't be right, can it?