Re: Gaim-Encryption plugin violates Gaim's license
On Mon, 06/02/03 at 09:25:32 -0500, Steve Langasek wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 02, 2003 at 06:21:55AM +0100, Robert McQueen wrote:
>
> > As a preamble if I just gatecrashed your mailbox or mailing list without
> > warning, I am the Debian package maintainer for Gaim, as well as a
> > frequent contributor to upstream development. I have just found out
> > today that the Gaim-Encryption plugin for Gaim, which can be found at
> > http://gaim-encryption.sourceforge.net/, makes use of the OpenSSL
> > library, and loads it into the same process space as Gaim.
>
> > Due to OpenSSL's four-clause BSD license (ie with the advertising clause),
> > it is therefore in violation of Gaim's GPL license because the OpenSSL
> > licence places an extra restriction beyond those allowable by the GPL.
> > The Debian project will not distribute code of this nature, especially
> > given that several Gaim developers (myself included) agree with the Debian
> > project's position on this, and this message constitutes us contacting
> > other distributors and the plugin author with this information.
>
> It should be noted that this can only be a violation of the GPL if
> someone is distributing the encryption plugin in binary form. (Does
> Gentoo distribute binaries of this software?) It is generally held that
> it would also *not* be a violation of the GPL if you distribute the
> encryption module in isolation, only if you distribute it together with
> binaries of gaim itself.
>
This is what I was thinking, Gentoo does distribute some binary
packages, so I will ensure that if Gaim is included in the binaries we
distribute gaim-encryption is NOT part of that build.
Thanks for the infos.
--Brandon Low
Senior Gentoo Developer
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