Ludovic Rousseau wrote:
You have the legal right to _run_ such a combination. The GPL has no
limitation on how you _execute_ the GPL software. You can mix a GPL
code and a proprietary code and use it. What you can't (legally) do is
_distribute_ such a mix.
I thought there was something like that, but I#m not sure about it.
also I don't know if it is allowed per so, or if it is only your
private business, i.e. nobody can stop you from doing that, see that
you are doing that or control that, but that doesn't make it right.
So using a proprietary PKCS#11 lib with a GPL application is fine.
well. the application needs the pkcs#11 headers too, so it has the
same license problem.
A similar problem exists for ndiswrapper. See [1, 2] for example. The
main difference is that only few (none ?) Windows driver usable by
ndiswrapper are GPL-compliant.
ndiswrapper is under GPL and there is one GPL'ed windows driver,
so that combination is legal and debian can distribute it.
for similar reasons pam_p11/libp11 are ok, as there are LGPL'ed
or BSD licensed pam applications (at least I hope), and those
could be legally combined. if someone combines login (which is GPL)
with pam_p11/libp11, that is a license conflict, but it is your private
business, so nobody cares.
once someone sells me an application that is preconfigured with login
using libp11/pam_p11 however it is no longer private business, but a
violation of copyright, to my knowledge, and there is the conflict.
by switching to our rewritten pkcs#11 headers we solve that conflict.
The main question for me is not what we can get away with
(login+pam_p11+libp11 - I think we can get away with that), but
what is proper to do. And I think cleaning up libp11 and opensc
to not use rsa header files (as long as hey have that license)
so we are GPL compatible is proper, it is shows we respect other peoples
decission on their licenses and try to comply to them.
Regards, Andreas
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