On Mon, 06/02/03 at 09:25:32 -0500, Steve Langasek wrote: > On Mon, Jun 02, 2003 at 06:21:55AM +0100, Robert McQueen wrote: > > > As a preamble if I just gatecrashed your mailbox or mailing list without > > warning, I am the Debian package maintainer for Gaim, as well as a > > frequent contributor to upstream development. I have just found out > > today that the Gaim-Encryption plugin for Gaim, which can be found at > > http://gaim-encryption.sourceforge.net/, makes use of the OpenSSL > > library, and loads it into the same process space as Gaim. > > > Due to OpenSSL's four-clause BSD license (ie with the advertising clause), > > it is therefore in violation of Gaim's GPL license because the OpenSSL > > licence places an extra restriction beyond those allowable by the GPL. > > The Debian project will not distribute code of this nature, especially > > given that several Gaim developers (myself included) agree with the Debian > > project's position on this, and this message constitutes us contacting > > other distributors and the plugin author with this information. > > 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. > This is what I was thinking, Gentoo does distribute some binary packages, so I will ensure that if Gaim is included in the binaries we distribute gaim-encryption is NOT part of that build.
Thanks for the infos. --Brandon Low Senior Gentoo Developer