Re: Debian package for freeradius_postgresql module

* Tom Lane (tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us) wrote:
> Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net> writes:
> > The courts are pretty likely to strongly consider the copyright holder's
> > opinion of the license when deciding how to interpret it.
>
> It's worth pointing out here that
>
> 1. Debian is not the copyright holder.

Not sure where you got the idea that I was suggesting they were, I
certainly wasn't.

> 2. The copyright holders, in this case the authors of freeradius, saw
> no problem with it.  They'd hardly have written GPL-licensed software
> that depends on a BSD-licensed package if they did, because the strict
> intepretation says that their code is undistributable, and obviously
> they intend to distribute it.

GPL-licensed software depending on a BSD-licensed package *isn't* a
problem.  If we didn't link Postgres w/ OpenSSL this wouldn't be any
issue at all.  If the freeradius authors explicitly say they don't have
a problem linking against a BSD-with-advertising-clause license
(or even explicitly exempt OpenSSL) then it's all fine.  Saying that
because they wrote freeradius to support Postgres that they implicitly
approve of the OpenSSL license is a more than a bit of a stretch.

    Thanks,

        Stephen