On Fri, Mar 22, 2002 at 11:05:29AM -0600, David Frascone wrote:
> Well, without going and looking it up again, I believe this was the
> situation: You can link Ethereal with OpenSSL only on platforms that
> ship OpenSSL by default. Otherwise, OpenSSL would be "tainted" by
> the GPL. So, since I can only tell whether OpenSSL is present, and
> *not* if it is normally shipped with the OS, I didn't move forward.
>
> Please, any legal gurus out there: Did I interpret the problem
> correctly? Or, if OpenSSL is present, can we use it?
I'm not a lawyer but have followed some legal issues of this type
through my involvement with Debian.
I don't think the problem is that OpenSSL becomes tainted by the
GPL, but the opposite -- Ethereal becomes tainted by a non-GPL
library. Ethereal has the more strict license of the two
(GPL versus BSD).
The OpenSSL FAQ mentions the system libraries exclusion in the GPL.
Debian takes the view that this does not apply to us; it is intended
for proprietary systems like Solaris for the days when complete GPL
platforms like Linux did not exist.
The Ethereal authors are free to add exceptions to the GPL to their
license as they please. Something like "Ethereal is licensed under
the GNU General Public License version 2, with the added exception
that you may link Ethereal with OpenSSL." This is the sort of
terminology used by KDE when Qt was not GPL.
Practically speaking, all the authors of Ethereal would need
to agree to the change in the license (to add this exception).
Hamish
--
Hamish Moffatt VK3SB <hamish@xxxxxxxxxx> <hamish@xxxxxxxxxxxx>