Ryan Shon wrote:
My boss hopes to sell this OpenSSL variant as a product. Because of this, he would not want customers who buy this product to be free to redistribute it on their own. If we were only to modify existing OpenSSL, then I assume our entire product would be subject to free redistribution by customers under the license. Is this correct?
My first answer would have been plain "no", but then i read the last sentences at http://www.openssl.org/source/license.html. I think (IANAL) that the answer depends on whether your product is regarded a derivative of OpenSSL. If you can put the main part of your code into a separate module and only modify OpenSSL to call your code then i assume that you can forbid the redistribution of *your* module. Whether you are allowed to forbid the redistribution of the modified OpenSSL may be questionable, but without your module this OpenSSL version is useless anyway.
However, if the cryptographic library in our OpenSSL variant were written from scratch, using no OpenSSL code (while the SSL library still used OpenSSL code), would we have the right to forbid redistribution of our cryptographic library and its source?
Yes (but you know, IANAL ;-)). Ciao, Richard -- Dr. Richard W. Könning Fujitsu Siemens Computers GmbH ______________________________________________________________________ OpenSSL Project http://www.openssl.org User Support Mailing List openssl-users@openssl.org Automated List Manager [EMAIL PROTECTED]
