Re: Debian readline/libedit breakage

Greg Stark wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 12:39 AM, Tom Lane <tgl@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  <bruce@momjian.us>        http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB
http://enterprisedb.com
 + It's impossible for everything to be true. +