"don't want to" isn't quite correct - they can't.
Perf is licensed under the GPLv2, libbfd under the GPLv3. The licenses are incompatible, which makes the combination unredistributable - which is what Debian would be doing with it.
Debian is legally not allowed to do this.
I wonder if a patch to addr2line would be accepted which allows the executable to stay running to accept multiple requests through stdin.
But shelling out to something or in some cases having an automated script create or download the derived work automatically is sometimes acceptable.
It’s a bit of a silly line in some ways. But it’s a long story.
My personal belief is that a court will only care about if your code is a wrapper (e.g, libgpg) or if it is its independently useful and just uses the library (e.g. PostgreSQL using libreadline) for a small part of its operation. But I am not a lawyer and this has not been tested in court as far as I know.
That's a bit disingenuous. Linus has said no to the GPLv3, yes, but his reasons for doing so have merit.
It can't possibly add any restrictions to the use of your project, because people can always just use it under the terms of GPLv2 if they want.
I guess it could remove restrictions, if the hypothetical GPLv4 was a total 180 and looked more like the MIT or Apache licenses, so I guess if that's a concern then you have a point.
If a third party forks a GPLv2+ project, adding features that are GPLv3+ licensed, the result is GPLv3+ licensed.
That means those wanting the GPLv2 licensed project won’t be able to use those new features.
As drran mentioned, I'm sure RMS would say the problem here is that Linux is licensed under v2 only. Linus of course would disagree.
Unfortunately it does not.
I've often wondered why more linux distros don't provide a similar tool to build ZFS into the kernel for you.
Ubuntu just bundles ZFS into the kernel statically - not even as a loadable module - and damn the licensing implications(!).
Take Yosys, an open source synthesis platform that allows external commands by adding shred libraries. It’s MIT licensed.
There is the Yosys-GHDL plug-in that allows using VHDL instead of Verilog compilation. It’s an independent open source project that can’t be merged into the main Yosys tree because GHDL itself is GPL 2.0.
Is the author of that plug-in violating the GHDL license? The plug-in glue code is GPL2 as well.
Can the GHDL authors ask the plug-in authors to take down their code (which has been forked many times on GitHub, of course.)
In this case, perf is (like the Linux kernel, in whose git tree it lives) GPLv2-only, and modern versions of libbfd are GPLv3-or-later, and it's not possible to comply with both at the same time. The GPLv2 has a "no additional restrictions" clause, and the GPLv3 asks for things the GPLv2 does not. So a distributor of a combined system including perf built against libbfd (like a Linux distro) cannot comply with the licenses.
(I suppose perf was written against the libbfd API back when libbfd was GPLv2, avoiding the question of whether perf is an illegal derivative work of libbfd. Or the backtracing API is de minimis, which means the source is fine but a compiled binary as par of a distro that also includes a modern libbfd is not.)
One possible answer here is to ask the perf authors to relicense under GPLv2 or later. Many years ago, at a startup that no longer exists, I wanted to reuse code from the Linux kernel "dm-verity" module in GRUB, which had moved to GPLv3, and I got a pretty quick answer from Red Hat (who was the only copyright holder for those files) saying that would be fine.
In this spirit, is there any legal issue with downloading perf and libbfd separately, compiling it, and running using it for yourself only? I assume not?
What about using it then as a tool within your company? That might be seen as distribution, and thus not allowed?
Debian could even ship you something that compiles perf against libbfd on your own system. This is the approach they take with ZFS and Linux, which are under incompatible licenses (CDDL and GPLv2): https://bits.debian.org/2016/05/what-does-it-mean-that-zfs-i...
A company is generally a single legal person and so there's no "distribution", but https://www.jolts.world/index.php/jolts/article/view/66/125 is a law review article that discusses the complexities here. If you employ contractors, or if the company as a whole is purchased, the answer is apparently blurrier.
That makes it arguably not a system library, so it's fair that Debian would want to steer clear of that interpretation.
It depends on gcc, for some reason, and that depends on binutils?
(and I have no idea if anything here uses libbfd, since it's just a part of the binutils package and not split out)
In a society with different laws, there would be no problem. I wonder what would be greater - the productivity gain when we would not have to make workarounds due to licensing, and when we could just legally access the source code of everything. Or the loss, because people might have less incentive to innovate, or they would just keep the source hidden.
The economic activity & value directly suppressed by IPR is unbelievable. Hard to even mentally scratch the surface. It's extremely economical (for society) to digitally copy and distribute useful information.
Most Western IP laws are draconic in the purest sense of the word.
Unfortunately their is a very influential sect of "corporate-law fearing" IP fanatics at the heart of many FOSS tech traditions (RMS, et al). Not all of it is pragmatic.
IP laws in most countries are also not decided by a democratic process but rather pushed in by trade deals, which also make it almost impossible to change those laws.