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Re: OpenSSL and GPLed programs

This is not legal advice. No lawyer-client relationship is established. etc. etc. 


From: Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com>
To: debian-legal@lists.debian.org
Subject: Re: OpenSSL and GPLed programs
Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2001 07:12:01 -0700

[Aaron Lehmann kindly posted my private comment to him that Eric A.
Young's no-relicensing clause in his OpenSSL code is, as Aaron
articulately puts it, "a no-op".]

begin  Anthony Towns quotation:

> I specifically asked RMS about this in private mail before bringing up
> this thread: he indicated that this wasn't the case, but didn't have
> any further details to back his opinion up.

It is a tribute to Richard's protean importance to free software that there
actually _are_ several fields in which this would be a compelling
(albeit overly concise) argument.  However, copyright law isn't really
one of them.

I daresay that I, Aaron, and a number of other regulars here (and on
license-discuss@opensource.org) are familiar enough with the usual sort
of copyright law, and how licensing operates as a legal mechanism under
it, to see that Young's added clause, indeed, simply cements into his
licence what is already a fundamental concept of copyright law:  If you
don't own it, you simply cannot relicense it, by definition.

It is conceivable that RMS has in mind the possibility that copyright
law might vastly change in the future (leaving EAY's clause still
operative in its wake), and that some very unusual legal jurisdictions
might exist where copyright law has some different basis.  Otherwise,
it's difficult to imagine what he has in mind -- because, of course,
nobody has posted it.
Unfortunately I deleted the earlier correspondence on this issue so please excuse any misunderstanding.
An additional basis for the clause is to turn a default rule into a breach of contract/license issue, which can have different thresholds of proof, elements of breach, etc. than relying on copyright infringement.
Further, again my memory is hazy here, the clause may also limit an author from using a compatible license. Certainly the default rules prevent a derivative work author from using an incompatible license by virtue of the terms of the incompatible licenses. But the clause may also prevent a derivative work author from using license terms for that may be wholly compatible with the license for the code from which the derivative work was derived. It may be essentially "super-viral" (TM). But again I can't remember the exact language of the clause so please excuse me if I am way off here. 


> As I said, OpenSSL has three obnoxious advertising clauses on its
> license.

And they're all basically the same, making it a single issue (either
substitively or exactly the infamous original-BSD obnoxious advertising
clause; I'd have to re-check) -- which, I would maintain, is the _only_
genuine licensing problem with this codebase, one that is
well-understood and, yes, a real headache given the explosion in usage
of crypto.

--
Cheers,                                         kill -9 them all.
Rick Moen                                       Let init sort it out.
rick@linuxmafia.com


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