I noticed that there's a bunch of bugs filed to transition packages
depending on libreadline5-dev to libreadline-dev so that they can
transition to using libreadline6. [1].
One of those (#553741) was filed against CLisp, which is licensed
under GPLv2-only. Unfortunately, readline is under the GPLv3+ as of
version 6, so making that change is impossible to do legally.
Luckily, nothing had been done to clisp yet, (and I left a comment
there noting the problem). I noticed that the ruby maintainer also
wontfix'd the bug filed against ruby, as ruby is also not available
under the GPLv3.
However, seeing this made me wonder if perhaps some of the already-
resolved bugs in that list might be in packages licensed under GPLv2
whose maintainers *didn't* notice the issue (easy to miss, since the
transition bug didn't mention the significant change in license terms
for readline.)
After checking a scattering of random packages, I happened across one
example of this already in Debian testing: socat. It is GPLv2-only,
and is linked against GPLv3 libreadline6 in testing. (filed bug 579494).
I haven't done a search through the package list (and don't really
know how I'd go about doing that in an efficient/automated fashion),
so I don't know of any other license violating packages. But where
there's one, there's probably more (or else I was just extremely
lucky), so I thought I'd drop a note here about the issue to help
raise awareness of the problem again.
James
[1]
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?tag=readline6;users=d...@debian.org
