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

[Jonathan Schleifer]

Am 27.01.2009 um 14:29 schrieb 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.

We do not ship with py-OpenSSL.
We do not include any of the code from py-OpenSSL.
We do not ship with OpenSSL.
We do not include any code from OpenSSL.

I don't see where we are violating any license. OpenSSL is loaded at  
runtime, but GPL doesn't cover which code is allowed to be run in  
memory, it only covers distribution rights. So GPL doesn't forbid to  
mix GPL and non-GPL code in RAM, as long as you don't distribute the  
result (e.g. a core dump). Therefore I fail to see the problem.
d8289

Additionally, GPL explicitely allows "mere aggregation", so even our  
Windows binaries are no

See also:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/msg/ 
29c7588fbecproblem, as OpenSSL is a separate DLL which is loaded at  
runtime.

--
Jonathan

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