Greg Stark wrote: > On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 12:39 AM, Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: > > In particular, getting rid of use of OpenSSL would not be sufficient > > to satisfy the most rabid GPL partisans that we were in compliance. > > Huh? > > In what way would we not be in compliance? Or rather, what part of the > GPL would we be unable to comply with for distributing binaries? > > > I think what you're getting at is that distributing source which can > optionally link against GPL code might itself be a derivative work of > the GPL code and need to be distributed under the GPL even if it's not > built against it. I think that's just a straw man though, even the > most ardent GPL partisan isn't going to claim that the Postgres source > is a derivative work of readline because it has the option to link > against readline for additional incidental functionality. > > To give context the case where this comes up are things like Gimp > plugins *which are useless with thout the GIMP*. They're entirely > dependent on the Gimp for their functionality. Claiming they're > derivative works of the Gimp is a lot easier than claiming that > Postgres is a derivative work of readline. A more borderline case was > programs based on GMP. However even there it's hard to picture a > useful program which needs GMP being able to do anything useful > without GMP. Even then just providing a (much poorer) alternative > implementation makes the case fall apart.
You are right that our source code is not require the GPL because it can use libreadline, but I am worried about people producing binaries that do link (dynamically?) against libreadline, which is GPL. -- Bruce Momjian <br...@momjian.us> http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com + It's impossible for everything to be true. + -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
