Re: Netatalk and OpenSSL licencing
On Mon, Aug 09, 2004 at 09:50:30PM +0200, Freek Dijkstra wrote:
> I understand the low risk thing. However, in this case, I'd say it's worth
> the lawsuit. Though I have supported FSF, in the particular case I'd hope
> they lose :-) (I'm sure Richard Stallman doesn't agree with me).
If they lose that lawsuit, then the virality of the GPL would be completely
undermined. I'm not the GPL's biggest fan, but I don't want to see that
happen.
In any event, I agree with it in principle: if something is legitimately
restricted when statically linking, the idea that you can "get around" the
requirement simply by putting part of the code in another binary file and
linking it at runtime seems silly.
> However, that being said, I claim it does not apply to this particular
> scenario! In this case, I suggested to distributed a binary of netatalk,
> including the UAMS linked with OpenSSL under GPL. To see if this is allowed
> you have to look at the *OpenSSL-licence*, NOT at the *GPL*.
This is incorrect. It is the GPL which is being violated, not the OpenSSL
license. The OpenSSL license says "advertising materials are required to
contain this and that acknowledgement"[1]. The GPL says "you may not add
any requirements in derived works". These requirements are mutually exclusive:
requiring the former is in violation of the latter.
> (You could for
> that matter have looked at the LGPL as well, which explicitly would have
> allowed dynamic linking).
The GPL and the LGPL have very different requirements; the LGPL was explicitly
intended to allow this case, where the GPL was explicitly intended to forbid
it.
[1] among other GPL-incompatible things
--
Glenn Maynard
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