Re: monit and SSL

[Jan-Henrik Haukeland]

Fredrik Steen <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi, 
> 
> The SSL support in monit is a very nice and desirable feature in monit, but
> for me as a packager of monit for the Debian project 
> (which have a very strict seeing on the OpenSSL+GPL issue) 
> I have some comments:
> 
> GPL is probably incompatible with OpenSSL's license, because the 
> "advertising clause in OpenSSL's license would add an additional 
> restriction on the GPL licensed software. 
> monit links against OpenSSL as default. (can be disabled  
> with the option --without-ssl).
> 
> In the current state I'm not able to upload monit with ssl-support wichh would
> be very desireable and a much needed feature.
> 
> Please see:
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2002/debian-legal-200204/msg00072.html
> and numerous other threads on the issue for more information.
> 
> Any ideas how to solve this?

>From reading the discussions via the link you sent, this looks like a
self inflicted problem created by interpreting the GPL rather strict
or uber-conservative. If it was up to me I would simply choose to
define this as a non-problem - much like what Linus Torvalds did when
Richard Stallman said that using properitary closed source programs on
Linux was an infringement of the GPL. Stallman, that fucking JERK,
felt that proprietary programs should not run on a OS released under
the GPL license. If he got his way, Linux would have been reduced to a
footnote in computer history.

Anyway, I'm trailing off here; this looks to me to be a problem
defined by the debian project and I do not think we are in a position
to do anything about it. I too think it would be depressing if debian
choose not to distribute monit with SSL because of a GPL vs. BSD
licensing problem. Of course, if you think it will help we will
probably be willing to add any additional statements in the monit
LICENSE as suggested by the OpenSSL project, like; "This program is
released under the GPL with the additional exemption that compiling,
linking, and/or using OpenSSL is allowed."

-- 
Jan-Henrik Haukeland