On Thu, 2019-03-21 at 10:04 +0100, Florian Weimer wrote: > * Ansgar Burchardt: > > > People have argued before that this applies to Debian. In that > > case > > Debian wouldn't be able to distribute binaries of GPL-2-only > > programs > > linking against any GPL-3+ runtime libraries like libstdc++? Or am > > I > > missing something? > > Yes, I think we need the system library exception for distributing > programs such as Git, which are GPLv2-only.
Git in Debian actually links (L)GPL-3+ libraries: /usr/lib/git-core/git-remote-https links libtasn1.so.6; libtasn1.so.6 is distributed under non-trivial terms (according to its Debian copyright file): The library is licensed under LGPL-2+.1, but build scripts are licensed under GPL-3+. It cannot be distributed under the terms of the GPL-2 as the GPL-2 requires the complete source to be distributed under terms compatible with the GPL-2; "complete source" explicitly includes build scripts. So it looks to me like libtasn1.so.6 is effectively only distributable under terms of the (L)GPL-3+, i.e. under terms incompatible with the GPL-2 Git uses. Ansgar
