Re: enabling transport and on storage encryption in bacula on debian build
On Wednesday 07 January 2009 21:59:45 Hendrik Weimer wrote:
> Kern Sibbald <kern@sibbald.com> writes:
> > 1. Build it from source yourself (perfectly legal -- only distribution
> > violates the GPL license).
>
> The question is whether it is legal to distribute the Bacula sources
> (including parts depending on OpenSSL) to begin with. These are
> uncertain legal grounds to say the least.
I personally don't believe that such distribution is a problem -- after all
Debian does distribute pure GPLv2 code and OpenSSL source code on the same
ISO image.
Problems of mismatched licenses apparently occur when forming and distributing
a "mixed" binary program or when mixing different licenced source code in the
same file and distributing it. As far as I know Bacula 2.4.x does not mix
source code with different licenses in the same source file (we simply call
libraries that when executed are incompatible), and Debian as well as its
derivatives have decided not to form a Bacula binary using the offending
libraries.
In any case, there are many other programs that have far worse problems than
the old Bacula code. Most of the Bacula problems involve code copyrighted by
FSF, and the FSF is very well aware of the Bacula problem all the way up to
RMS. They are also very well aware that I take those problems seriously and
fixed them a long time ago. For these kinds of "technical" problems, I
certainly hope that no one would not want to simply stop supplying the source
code -- that would likely hurt the users far more than helping the Free
Software movement, and so far none of the authors of the pure GPLv2 code have
complained.
I resolved the problem long time ago, so I consider it just a question of
ensuring a conservative, smooth transition from the old code the new code.
If someone is really concerned by the "legality" of using the old source, then
they should feel free to use the new code (beta), which has absolutely no
license problems.
Regards.
Lerm
>
> > 2. Wait for version 3.0.0 (currently in Beta testing as version
> > 2.5.28-b1). This version has no licensing problems (pointer to
> > details for version 2.4.x provided by John) and so Debian will be
> > able to release it with OpenSSL compiled in.
>
> Ah, that's good to hear!
>
> Hendrik
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