Re: [libesmtp-devel] Licence issues for libESMTP (and Balsa) - long (was Re: NTLM authentication)

[Jules Bean <jules jellybean co uk>]

On Thu, Jan 10, 2002 at 01:35:42PM +0000, Carlos Morgado wrote:
> Some time ago Debian noted mutt uses openssl. After some discussion the
> first aproach was considered impractical and as it stands Debian doesn't
> give openssl the status of 'system library'. I share this opinion as
> openssl is neither irreplacable or fulcral.

IIRC the system library exception may not be used when the system
concerned also contains the application concerned.

So debian is not allowed to claim the 'system library' exception for
openssl, since debian also distribute mutt (and, indeed, balsa and
libesmtp).

The reason for this limitation was something like the following:

The FSF choose to exempt system libraries, so that they can produce
(e.g) binaries of gzip linked against sunOS's libc.  However, they
don't want Sun themselves to use this exception to incorporate GPL'ed
code into SunOS itself; if Sun wishes to do that, they should
relicense SunOS more liberally.

Jules