git-remote-http is linked against incompatibly licensed OpenSSL

26 points by runxiyu


jclulow

OpenSSL is under the Apache License 2.0, which is, despite everyone’s best intentions, not actually compatible with the GNU General Public License version 2, and thus the Git binary is not actually distributable.

I feel like “best intentions” is doing a lot of work in that assessment. This aspect of the GPL always feels like a ridiculous posture. To the extent that it’s sensible to care about the difference between dynamically linking to a program (apparently bad!) and using posix_spawn(2) to run said program (apparently good!), it seems especially frivolous that the code being taken advantage of here is apparently in the library being used, not in the actual GPL work. It would make more sense to complain about this sort of thing if someone was making use of the GPL code itself in this way.