On Mon, Jun 02, 2003 at 09:25:32AM -0500, Steve Langasek wrote: > It should be noted that this can only be a violation of the GPL if > someone is distributing the encryption plugin in binary form. (Does > Gentoo distribute binaries of this software?) It is generally held that > it would also *not* be a violation of the GPL if you distribute the > encryption module in isolation, only if you distribute it together with > binaries of gaim itself.
What about the end user who loads the plugin and OpenSSL becomes a part of their running Gaim process? My concern is that even if you distribute in source form, you're still condoning ignoring part of Gaim's license, which seems highly dubious. So as well as saying "Debian will never ship this" as a Debian developer, I was also saying "please do not encourage your users to ignore our license" as a Gaim contributor. I'd favour that Gaim-Encryption isn't included by distributors at all until it is reworked to use GNUTLS as Bill has so kindly agreed to do, hopefully within the next 2 or 3 weeks. Maybe around that time CVS will have settled a bit and we can consider putting GNUTLS into Gaim and support Jabber SSL finally... > Given that you have explicitly said you don't have access to all > contributors to effect I license change, I presume this means gaim is > under the canonical GPL license, and that you are not attempting to > promote an alternative, overbroad interpretation of the GPL with your > statements above. Yes, Gaim is under "GPL version 2 or later at your choice" and we are unable to change this. > To be precise, you cannot take advantage of the GPL's "OS exemption" if > your product is the OS. I don't quite see how this relates. What I meant was that if you have Gaim for Windows, and load in Gaim-Encryption, then you have linked OpenSSL into the GPL Gaim binary and therefore violated Gaim's license, because OpenSSL is definitely not a component of the OS on Windows. > -- > Steve Langasek > postmodern programmer Regards, Rob -- Exam progress-o-meter: [====................] 20%
