Once upon a time, David A. Wheeler dwheeler@dwheeler.com said:
That will probably create many legal problems. If there's a way to keep this package, we should.
As many of you know, the basic problem is that the OpenSSL license is incompatible with the GPL:
Aside from the "system library" exemption already mentioned, most GPL software that links against OpenSSL has a specific exemption in the documentation.
Any program that links to libgnutls-openssl that has GPL'ed components probably CANNOT be legally linked to OpenSSL.
The flip side of that is that libgnutls-openssl is GPLv3+, which means that anything under GPLv2-only or any other non-GPLv3-compatible license may not be able to use it. I'm not sure, since it implements somebody else's interface; can anything using the OpenSSL library API be considered a derived work of libgnutls-openssl (by virtue of linking)?