On Tue, 26 Mar 2002, Adam wrote:
> > My personal view is that we could start carefully adding support for
> > OpenSSL perhaps only on the platforms that provide it as standard with
> > the OS, namely some Linux and BSD distros.
>
> IMHO that is fairly good idea (apart from screwing windows users).
There's another license issue here, on MS Windows: anyone who has
accepted SDKs from Microsoft recently has implicitly agreed not to link
Microsoft's code with code whose license attempts to impose further
obligations on the Microsoft code. The GPL is the main target of this
clause. Tread carefully.
> Also now that I think about it, it might be safer as well since once
> we change our GPL license we might be incompatibile with other GPL
> licenses (would that be case). and thus for example it could prevent us
> from incorporating other GPL'ed code out of there (like from ettercap).
> Or am I missunderstanding GPL.
A typical solution is to offer the user a choice of licenses: "you may
use this product under the terms of the GNU General Public License, or
under the terms of the original BSD License, at your option." FSF has a
whole page of comments on various licenses and how they combine with the
GPL.
> So seems to me like config option which checks a) if there's OpenSSL *and*
> b) if the plaform is linux or BSD and only then enable the functionality
> would best IMHO.
It's a bit more complex than that. Theoretically the system on which I'm
writing this is still Slackware 1.2, although I claim to have replaced
piecemeal all but a few kilobits over the years. I'm fairly sure that
OpenSSL didn't come with Slackware 1.2, but it's installed now. How would
the config script understand this?
--
Mark H. Wood, Lead System Programmer mwood@xxxxxxxxx
MS Windows *is* user-friendly, but only for certain values of "user".
