Re: [Savannah-hackers-public] openssl license

[Yavor Doganov]

Nicodemo Alvaro wrote:
> If you take a look at this license notice you would find that it is
> incompatible with the GPL.

Yes, that's a well known issue, see
http://www.gnome.org/~markmc/openssl-and-the-gpl.html.

> The project GiVME has a dependency on openssl.

It should have a special exception similar to other packages linking
against openssl (see gnubiff, for example).  The tricky part is that
it's not sufficient that only the program has the exception, the
licenses of other libraries must be compatible as well.  So if you
have an app foo under GPL+OpenSSL exception linking both against
libopenssl and libbar (pure GPL), that's not OK.

It becomes even trickier for indirect linking.  For example, Gajim is
under GPLv3 only and optionally depends on python-openssl (OpenSSL
Python bindings), which is under LGPL, but links against libopenssl.
I'm not sure whether an exception is required in this case, but it
seems logical that it should be.

Another classic example of indirect linking is if you link against a
library which itself links with openssl (like libsnmp).

> Openssl is distributed with GNewSense, so maybe I am missing
> something.

Sure, it's free software, so why not?

FWIW, there was a discussion between Brett Smith and some Debian folks
(Steve Langasek, Anthony Towns, IIRC) a few years ago on debian-legal.
They defended the position that openssl fulfils the criteria of a
"system library" in a distro like Debian, as it's part of the minimal
installation and too many packages of priority
"required|important|standard" depend on it.  I don't remember whether
Brett bought the argument.