[Fedora-legal-list] Re: Legal Problem: md5 implementation

[Tom Lane]

"Tom \"spot\" Callaway" <tcallawa at redhat.com> writes:
> On Mon, 2007-09-17 at 18:02 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
>> Not sure I see the point of the sort of patch you seem to envision.
>> If we are shipping SRPMs containing upstream tarballs that contain
>> BSD+ad code, haven't we got an issue anyway?

> BSD + advertising is Free, but GPL incompatible. It only becomes a
> problem when BSD+ad code is directly compiled into GPL/LGPL licensed
> code. So, its fine to have a standalone BSD+ad package, but it is
> definitely not fine for a GPL licensed software package to have BSD
> +advertising code inside it.

I concur that they're not compatible.  What I don't follow is why this
argument doesn't prevent us from shipping the upstream tarball at all.
A patch might make the binary "clean" in some ill-defined sense, but
it doesn't fix the sources.  And ultimately the point of the GPL is to
have access to the source code and be able to do what you want with it.

ISTM the only answer is to pressure upstream to fix their issue.

			regards, tom lane