Subject: bug#34717: GPL and Openssl incompatibilities in u-boot and possibly others

From: Vagrant Cascadian <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2021 14:15:00 -0700

On 2021-10-22, Leo Famulari wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 21, 2021 at 11:17:03PM -0700, Vagrant Cascadian wrote:
>> While openssl 3.0 is licensed compatibly with GPLv3, u-boot has portions
>> which are GPLv2-only, so that's not as attractive of a way forward as
>> one might hope for...
>
> What are other distros doing? Surely we can't be the only group
> distributing u-boot?

Both fedora and (recently) debian have openssl declared as a system
library, invoking the GPL's system library exception... which I
personally find at best to be a grey area workaround.

I wouldn't be surprised if most distros simply ignore the issue
entirely.

Interestingly, today I was called in on a relevent discussion on the
u-boot mailing list:

  https://lists.denx.de/pipermail/u-boot/2021-October/464529.html

Though, it is *possible* that various u-boot-BOARD in some cases doesn't
include any openssl code at all in the resulting binaries, but builds
some tools used during the build process, that are then used to produce
various cryptographic signatures in the build:

  https://lists.denx.de/pipermail/u-boot/2021-October/464533.html

If that's true, it should be ok for various boards (though the
possibility of openssl code getting linked in would be hard to
catch).

u-boot-tools would still need a viable workaround, though.

live well,
  vagrant