[ruby-core:30788] Re: [Feature #2032] Change the license to "GPLv2+ or Ruby's original".

On 16/06/10 at 11:48 +0900, mathew wrote:
> However, I haven't seen a FSF statement as to whether distributing GPL2 code that links with GPL3 code is a violation.

I don't think it requires an FSF statement. It's obvious: if your code
is GPLv2-only (like Ruby), you can't link to GPLv3 code and distribute
the resulting binary. If your code is GPLv2+, you are permitted to do
so, but the resulting binary is distributed under the terms of GPLv3,
not GPLv2 or GPLv3.

What makes the situation even more "interesting" in the Ruby case is
that the ruby binary itself or the libruby shared lib, are not linked
to readline directly. Instead, you load a .so using 'require' if you
want to add readline support.
Debian's point of view on that, which is very pragmatic (possibly too
much), is that it's fine to distribute readline.so linked to readline5,
and that the resulting binary is only "contaminated" by GPL when you
load readline.so. That makes it possible for the Debian package to ship
support for both readline and openssl: what is forbidden is to ship a
binary (or, probably, a script), that requires both modules loaded at
the same time.
Now, this approach is very liberal, and I'm not sure the FSF would
agree.

Maybe the best thing to do would be to contact the FSF lawyers to ask
them for feedback?
-- 
| Lucas Nussbaum
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