Re: Licence question (suprise!)
Matthew Vernon <matthew@debian.org> writes:
> See bug 211644 for context. Currently, the patch to ssh (which is a
> substantial piece of work) is released under the GPL. OpenSSL is
> apparantly not under the "integral part of the system" exception, so
> there is a conflict between my GPL patch, and the OpenSSL licence.
>
> Can I just say "...distributed under the terms of the GPL, with the
> exception that this code may be linked with OpenSSL" or somesuch? I'd
> rather not relicence under a BSD-style thingumy.
Yeah. See [1] for an example in legalese -- note, for example, that
it's careful to be precise about exactly what the OpenSSL license is,
and that it allows modifiers to remove the exception if they wish. Both
of these are a good idea. Another (possibly simpler) option would be to
use the LGPL.
Ordinarily, you'd want to make sure that you're not adding the exception
to code you don't have complete copyright over, but looking at the bug
report it doesn't look like that's the case here.
(small world....)
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2002/debian-legal-200207/msg00454.html,
--
Jeremy Hankins <nowan@nowan.org>
PGP fingerprint: 748F 4D16 538E 75D6 8333 9E10 D212 B5ED 37D0 0A03
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