On Fri, 2010-04-09 at 13:45 +0100, Thomas Horsten wrote: > On 9 April 2010 00:48, Dan Williams <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, 2010-04-08 at 19:16 +0100, Thomas Horsten wrote: > > For legal compliance and certification reasons it can be > useful to use > > a specific cryptographic backend in a product with > NetworkManager. > > > Unfortunately, it's illegal to combine OpenSSL with GPL code > unless the > code has specifically added an OpenSSL exception > (NetworkManager does > not have such an exception). So while I greatly appreciate > the work > that you've done, I feel very uneasy about accepting a patch > that when > enabled, would make distribution of the result illegal :( > > > I'm a bit confused about this now - although the COPYING file in the > libnm-utils is GPLv2, the headers of the source files for the library > all have LGPL and not GPL, and so it should be fine to link with > OpenSSL. I'm not sure though, and I don't know the history of > NetworkManager well enough to see through what's going on here, so any > clarification would be appreciated. > > > If the library is indeed LGPL though, I don't see a problem with > including the OpenSSL backend.
It's not a problem if libnm-util is never used by a GPL program. But the problem comes when you install something that uses libnm-util, and is GPL. NetworkManager itself links to libnm-glib and libnm-util, as do other programs like nm-applet. Thus, if you have an OpenSSL-enabled libnm-util on your system, and you install NetworkManager, you cannot legally run NetworkManager if it is linked to that libnm-util. Would you mind modifying the patch to include a large warning in configure.ac that says something like the following when you "./configure --with-crypto=openssl": --- WARNING! Enabling OpenSSL support may cause the combination of libnm-util and GPL programs to be illegal in your jurisdiction. Please check with your lawyer before enabling OpenSSL support. --- I'll keep checking with some legal-type people for more information. I'm not necessarily against the patch, but we do need to have some sort of warning here. Thanks! Dan _______________________________________________ networkmanager-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/networkmanager-list
