On 30/03/17 21:09, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Lars Wirzenius <l...@liw.fi> writes:
> 
>> Instead, I'll repeat that licenses shouldn't be violated. One way of
>> achieving that is to ask copyright holders for additional permissions
>> that are needed to avoid a violation.
> 
> The problem with this approach, though, is that many of us have tried this
> with GPL software that links against OpenSSL and have been told that we're
> being pedantic, wasting the maintainer's time, and they aren't going to
> include any such specific license grant because they're not lawyers,
> aren't going to mess with licenses, no one else has this problem, and
> Debian needs to pull the stick out of its ass.
> 
> Now one can just say "well, we don't want to package software from
> maintainers like that anyway," but often those people are perfectly
> reasonable on many other topics and quite good upstreams.  We are widely
> viewed as out of step with the community on this specific point, whether
> reasonably or unreasonably.
> 
> I'm not saying we're wrong, necessarily, but the way that Debian interacts
> with software licenses is truly not the way that nearly everyone else
> interacts with software licenses.  We have non-lawyers with no legal
> training read them carefully and attempt to apply their rules as if they
> were written in normal English, very precisely.  (In other words, we treat
> them like they're computer programs.)  Very, very few people outside of
> Debian do this.  Elsewhere, people largely divide into two camps: a quick
> skim looking for obvious issues followed by "meh, good enough," or review
> by an actual lawyer who is making a legal decision based on legal
> interpretation, case law, and a risk analysis.
> 
> I think we normally arrive at reasonable conclusions, but sometimes we do
> arrive at conclusions that neither of those other two camps reach, and
> then we can look oddly out of touch.
> 

Couldn't agree more with you.

Programmers shouldn't try to interpret corner cases on licenses,
or judge about license compatibility.

What the text of a license says is never interpreted word by word by a
lawyer or a tribunal. The intention is also very important.

And when you release a software that uses OpenSSL, there is a clear
intention in that fact that you allow to use OpenSSL. After all, you
have implemented support for it.

I think we should try to consult more with lawyers when we have doubts,
or when there is a disagreement about licenses in general.

It worked for the ZFSOnLinux case.
I think it can work also for this system library exception issue.

My 2 cents.

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