On 06-05-13 11:49, Richard Fontana wrote:
Here's what I've been trying to say, or what I've been thinking about
at least: There are obviously multiple ways of interpreting the GPL
generally and as applied to some particular fact pattern. But I
discern at least two principal macro-interpretations of the GPL. One
consists of the collective and evolving (explicit where recorded at
all) doctrine of the FSF, as further interpreted or, seemingly,
misinterpreted by others. The other is a mostly implicit body of
doctrine deducible from behavior, that consists of what developers and
distributors actually *do*, and what upstream licensors seem to
knowingly tolerate.
Hm, but Debian has certainly in the past acted on GPL incompatibilities
between packages. For example "php -a" was broken for a while because
the GNU readline license isn't compatible with the php license [1].
I vaguely remember similar problems with debian shipping various programs
without SSL support for a while because the OpenSSL license is not
considered GPL compatible.
[1]
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=286356
So, as far as I can tell at least Debian takes things seriously and
largely follows the FSF interpretation.
-- kuno / warp.