Re: Bacula: GPL and OpenSSL
On Thursday 07 June 2007 20:15, John Goerzen 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?)
Well, most of the other files are FSF copyrighted, and FSFE told me that FSF
always sticks to the letter of the license (logical) so I haven't tried to
contact the other users.
I could have gone on with the current situation because no one has filed a
formal complaint. However, I *much* prefer to be in compliance and not to
violate anyone's copyright.
>
> So the question really is: how can we have Bacula in Debian, with SSL
> support, but without that clause?
This is apparently possible because GNUTLS seems to have an OpenSSL
compatiblity layer. However, this is not something that I can personally
look at in the very near future.
In addition, over time, I will remove *all* code that is not copyrighted with
the "Bacula" license, but that will probably take even longer to fix.
> And why does FSFE disagree with our interpretation?
I don't know. One possibility is that I misunderstood them. My understanding
is that it all has to do with distribution. If one does not distribute GPLed
binaries mixed with non-GPLed code and one's distributed binaries use only
shared objects that are on the user's system, there is no problem. This is in
fact what happens with glibc and many other libraries, which are not
*required* to run a system, but are on the system. That is my understanding.
In any case, that is how I am going to interprete it until someone threatens
me, and if that happens, which I doubt, the project will simply stop
releasing binaries that can run with OpenSSL, and hopefully by then everyone
will have switchted to GPL v3 where this stupid problem does not exist. I
don't imagine that is a solution for Debian though.
>
> -- John
>
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