Re: CUPS is now linked against OpenSSL

[Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk>]

Russ Allbery writes ("Re: CUPS is now linked against OpenSSL"):
> Isn't GMP an official GNU project?  I thought the FSF had an
> organization-wide policy to relicense all of their packages to v3 or
> later.

Perhaps we might be able to persaude them to make an exception for
GMP.  The FSF certainly recognise that licensing decisions are a
question of tactics.

The argument I would make (because I believe in it) is that lack of
good cryptographic software is a bigger threat to the freedom of users
than tivoisation (and, the other downsides of GPLv2 compared to v3).
I'm no fan of TLS but it is very unfortunate that we are considering
further weakening security provisions in printing protocols, for
example, because of this kind of licensing problem.

(This is true even though a GPLv2+ GMP can be used as _part of_ a
cryptographically enforced tivoisation setup, whereas a GPLv3+ GMP can
only be part of such a system at the "mater" rather than "slave" end.)

For vaguely analogous reasons we (the free software world) try to make
our codecs have very liberal licences.

Ian.