[Gajim-devel] Licence incompatibility -- GPL and OpenSSL

[Yavor Doganov]

[I submitted this as a Trac ticket, but got "Submission rejected due
to potential spam" or similar.]

I believe Gajim is currently not distributable, as even an optional
dependency on python-openssl requires the license of Gajim to have the
(in)famous OpenSSL exception.  Although PyOpenSSL is under LGPL, it is
merely a wrapper and the interpreted program (Gajim) is effectively
linked with the library (libssl) through the python extension
(PyOpenSSL).

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#OpenSSL
http://www.gnome.org/~markmc/openssl-and-the-gpl.html
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#IfInterpreterIsGPL
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#InterpreterIncompat

(The questions from the GPL FAQ are not about this specific problem,
but the explanations give answers to that as well.)

Probably an easier alternative to relicensing would be to use
python-gnutls, the GnuTLS bindings.