On April 22, 2002 16:00, Marc Mutz wrote:
> On Monday 22 April 2002 19:33, George Staikos wrote:
> <snip>
>
> >     I wrote the KDE SSL code, and I don't care about the state of the
> > OpenSSL licence.  I don't have issues with the clause that says I must
> > explicitly give credit to the original author of OpenSSL, which to my
> > knowledge, is the only offending clause.
>
> <snip>
>
> IANAL and I don't want to heat this discussion up again, yet I want to
> report that I was told by people (GNUs) on CeBIT that dynloading OpenSSL
> might be considered linking and thus might make us violate the GPL, since
> OpenSSL isn't GPL compatible. I'd like to hear what other people think
> about this, though, since I can't really say anything about that.
>
> Andreas?


   I can write a program that reads in a text file that is not under GPL, 
converts it to machine instructions, and executes it.  I can subdivide this 
task even more if that is not sufficient to show that dynamically loading a 
library is no different than reading machine-input and behaving accordingly.  
I don't buy this argument at all, and I don't suspect that I ever will.  
(though I have heard it many times)

   So what if I open OpenSSL as an input file, read it in, then convert it to 
an executable with f(x) = x, and then execute f(x)?  No different than 
reading in a text file.  Must all of our input files now be GPL too?  If so, 
then the GPL is broken and we should consider abandoning it.





