What does readline have to do with OpenSSL

No, not at all. I read the article for a fourth time and it's still confusing. This article is in desperate need of revision. Its message would be greatly improved if the parts about readline were removed and you focused solely on the OpenSSL issue.

You already established that the readline library is compatible with PostgreSQL. From the second paragraph of the article:

> But readline is licensed under the GPL (rather than the LGPL), which
> means that programs which use it must have a compatible license and
> PostgreSQL's BSD-ish permissive license certainly qualifies.

The title of the article states that it's about "PostgreSQL, OpenSSL, and the GPL" and the first paragraph only talks about OpenSSL. In fact, the first paragraph is setting up a discussion about how OpenSSL and PostgreSQL might have license compatibility issues. Bringing up readline out of the blue, and never tying it to your point, leaves me confused about what you are attempting to communicate. It's as if you started this article about readline but switched to talking about OpenSSL and never fully edited out the readline information.

Here's another example:

> Unfortunately, a bug in libedit means that Debian PostgreSQL users can't
> input multi-byte characters into the psql command-line tool when using
> Unicode locales.
> For the PostgreSQL project, it is something of a "rock and a hard place"
> problem. The OpenSSL code works well, and is fairly tightly—perhaps too
> tightly—integrated.

So again you are talking about readline (or libedit as a replacement) then you mention that this puts the PostgreSQL project into a difficult position. Reading this I expect the next sentence to be related to readline and now this readline difficulty will be resolved. Yet, you switch back to talking about OpenSSL and I'm left saying, "Huh?"

In fact, you mention that it's the Debian project, not PostgreSQL, that has a problem with readline. Debian's problems aren't PostgreSQL's problems.

If the license issues are similar with readline and PostgreSQL, then a short mention of that at the end of the article would be sufficient. As it is, the article is switching between the two without warning and without clearly establishing the relationship between all of them. The statement which I quoted at the top of this post only further confuses matters.