Misunderstanding GPL's terms and conditions as restrictions

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Jul 29, 2008, Alexandre Oliva <aoliva at redhat.com> wrote:

> On Jul 28, 2008, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> RSAREF didn't stop the program from being created in the first place,
>>> or from being distributed under the GPL in source form.

>> Per the FSF, RIPEM was a derived work of gmp and could not be
>> distributed execept under the GPL.  However that was impossible
>> because RSAREF was needed and had other terms.

> I don't see where the FSF said such a thing.  I see the FSF discussing
> restrictive patent licenses that SSH developers had accepted, and that
> didn't permit them to distribute the work under the GPL, with as
> little as plugs for RSAREF to be used.

Err...  Digging further, I found out that RIPEM included RSAREF, and
it was RSAREF itself that had been modified in such a way that it
became a derived work of GPLed work.  So this modified version of
RSAREF could only be distributed under the GPL, which neither the
patent license nor the copyright license under which RSAREF were
provided permitted.

So is looks like it is the main program (SSH?) that was the
distraction.  Anyhow, if you have pointers to more specific
information about what the FSF actually wrote (all I found was
second-hand hearsay), I'd love to know more about it.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva         http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Free Software Evangelist  oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
FSFLA Board Member       ¡Sé Libre! => http://www.fsfla.org/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}