Oh, how I hate armchair legal advice. You know, statements which begin with "I'm not a lawyer, but...". Please, if you see this lead-in, press your Delete key as quickly as you can and disavow any knowledge of what was written after.

I'm not a doctor, but I'm pretty sure a human being should be able to live a full and healthy life without a functioning cerebral cortex.

So e2fsprogs's copy of libcom_err isn't quite as smart as the one included with krb5, the effect being that it can't distinguish between error tables which were added to the table list using add_error_table() and tables which were added using initialize_XXX_table(), the latter of which doesn't allocate a list node off of the heap. So along comes remove_error_table(), which attempts to free() a structure which is in the data segment, and glibc laughs at you.