[openssl-dev] License change agreement

Quanah Gibson-Mount quanah at symas.com
Fri Mar 24 02:26:48 UTC 2017


--On Friday, March 24, 2017 1:37 AM +0000 Peter Waltenberg 
<pwalten at au1.ibm.com> wrote:

>
> OpenSSL has a LOT of commercial users and contributors. Apache2 they can
> live with, GPL not so much.
> There's also the point that many of the big consumers (like Apache :))
> are also under Apache2.
>
> Least possible breakage and I think it's a reasonable compromise. Of
> course I am biased because I work for the one of the commercial users.

Zero people that I know of are saying to switch to the GPL.  What is being 
pointed out is that the incompatibility with the current OpenSSL license 
with the GPLv2 has been a major problem.  Switching to the APLv2 does 
nothing to resolve that problem.  As has been noted, the current 
advertising is a huge problem with the existing license.  One of the 
reasons that has been a big problem is that it makes the license 
incompatible with the GPLv2.  So on the one hand, getting rid of that 
clause is great.  On the other hand, getting rid of it by switching to the 
APL is not great, because it doesn't resolve the fundamental problem of 
being incompatible with the GPLv2.

As was noted back when this was brought up in 2015, there are other, 
better, licenses than the APLv2 which are also GPLv2 compatible.  The MPLv2 
being an example of such a license.  There is also BSD, MIT/X11, etc.  The 
GPLv2 incompatibility of OpenSSL is a major problem.

--Quanah

--

Quanah Gibson-Mount
Product Architect
Symas Corporation
Packaged, certified, and supported LDAP solutions powered by OpenLDAP:
<http://www.symas.com>



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