Re: Sofia SIP COPYRIGHTS

[Walter Landry <wlandry@ucsd.edu>]

Michael Poole <mdpoole@troilus.org> wrote:
> George Danchev writes:
> > 	Another source of pain could be linking Sofia-SIP with OpenSSL
> > (which is optional by nice to have it there) and as suggested by
> > Mark [1] it is safe to have so called OpenSSL_exception [2]. So
> > the question is - is it fine to link LGPL (not GPL'ed) code with
> > OpenSSL licensed code ? Otherwise I believe we can have that
> > OpenSSL exception with no worries.
> 
> The OpenSSL people claim there is no need, but the customary practice
> is for any LGPL'ed (or GPL'ed) work that links directly against
> OpenSSL to have the "OpenSSL exception" granted by its copyright
> holders.  I am not sure what the requirement is for scenarios where
> the program also links against other LGPL'ed libraries, as in:
> 
>   gcc -o program $(OBJECT_FILES) -lssl -lsome_lgpl_lib

For LGPL'd code, there is no problem with linking in OpenSSL code.
The problem only arises for GPL'd code, because the GPL requires
everything which makes part of the "whole" to be licensed under terms
no more restrictive than the GPL.  The LGPL only requires that for the
library itself, not modules it links with.

CUPS provides an OpenSSL exemption because a lot of their code is
under the GPL, not the LGPL.

Cheers,
Walter Landry
wlandry@ucsd.edu