Re: Bacula: GPL and OpenSSL

[Walter Landry <wlandry@ucsd.edu>]

John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 07, 2007 at 10:50:39AM -0700, Walter Landry wrote:
> > John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org> wrote:
> > > Kern believes that he must remove the explicit OpenSSL exemption from
> > > the license in order to be fully GPL-compliant, and it appears that FSFE
> > > agrees.
> > 
> > I just read the contents of 
> > 
> >   /usr/share/doc/bacula-director-sqlite/copyright
> > 
> > I have reproduced it below for debian-legal.  The Linking section,
> > which is needed for linking with OpenSSL, is not a problem for
> > GPL-compatibility.  The other parts may or may not be a problem, and
> > indeed seem superfluous, but all that is needed is the Linking
> > section.
> 
> But the problem is that parts of Bacula's code are copyrighted by third
> parties, and licensed under plain GPL (or Kern's license before he added
> this exception), and may be unreachable for obtaining permission to
> relicense with this exception.  (Kern, have you tried contacting them?)

I understand.  My impression was that there was a claim that the
exemption had to be removed for all files, not just the problematic
ones.  So I tried to allay that particular concern.

> So the question really is: how can we have Bacula in Debian, with SSL
> support, but without that clause?

Make Bacula use GnuTLS.  Unfortunately, that may take some effort.
Downloading the 2.0.3 release, it seems that bacula uses the headers

<openssl/ssl.h>
<openssl/evp.h>
<openssl/x509v3.h>
<openssl/rand.h>
<openssl/err.h>
<openssl/asn1.h>
<openssl/asn1t.h>

According to this page

  http://www.gnu.org/software/gnutls/comparison.html

GnuTLS + libgcrypt + libtasn1 implements everything unless you need
ECC.

> And why does FSFE disagree with our interpretation?

Michael Poole gave a good answer.

Cheers,
Walter Landry
wlandry@ucsd.edu