Hi

I'm a bit disturbed by the recent discussions in the Debian devel camp, where
they seriously are propagating for throwing out the libcurl version powered by
OpenSSL to replace it with the one powered by GnuTLS. Yes, not adding one -
they mean replacing it.

The main reason for this seems to be the old GPL bigotry since OpenSSL is
under an Original BSD style license while GnuTLS is LGPL licensed. (See
http://curl.haxx.se/legal/licmix.html for these license details.)

I'm mentioning this here primarily to inform you developers of tools and
applications that rely on libcurl, that you might be up for some surprises
soon in Debian land.

I've tried to point out that there are multiple reasons why removing the
OpenSSL-based package is bad [*], but I have no cred in their camp and my
options don't count.

I feel a bit sad that my work on getting GnuTLS supported now is about to
backlash in my face.

These guys talk about fixing the problems if there are any. Yeah right, I
sooooo believe they are gonna step up and do that. No, I think it is a safe
bet that this is gonna get back on us. *We* are gonna get questioned and
bothered when things no longer work like they used to.

I'm not at all questioning Domenico Andreoli (Debian curl maintainer) on this
or anything. I firmly believe he does an outstanding work as the Debian curl
package probably is the best maintained curl package of all Linux
distributions. This seems more like what other Debian developers and
maintainers think and impose.

This issue isn't decided yet or anything, and even it will be decided to go
like this I can't but to assume that the decision will be reverted in the
future if the problems are too big.

Some debian-devel threads to read up this:

http://groups-beta.google.com/group/linux.debian.devel/browse_thread/thread/be373a5456c6f6a5/ffc9ef58671bae30?tvc=2&q=libcurl#ffc9ef58671bae30
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/linux.debian.devel/browse_thread/thread/5c01def27286108/eb8ed645cbaf1e08?tvc=2&q=libcurl#eb8ed645cbaf1e08

[*] = http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/08/msg00454.html

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