Hi octave devs, During a look of the octave package in guix (a functional package manager, part of gnu), we notice octave have an optional dependency on openssl.
However, since the license of octave (gpl3+) is incompatible with that of openssl (https://people.gnome.org/~markmc/openssl-and-the-gpl.html), the resulting binary after linking is not re-distributable. So, we drop the optional dependency to avoid the problem. Is there any plan to fix this problem? There are some solutions we think of: 1. add openssl linking exception to the license 2. provide support for linking with gnutls as an alternative. In any case, I think we should warn the user about it. What are your ideas? (the messages below include the whole discussion on the guix-devel mailing list) Thanks, Alex Leo Famulari <l...@famulari.name> writes: > On Sat, Aug 06, 2016 at 09:52:39AM +0800, Alex Vong wrote: >> Ricardo Wurmus <rek...@elephly.net> writes: >> >> > Alex Vong <alexvong1...@gmail.com> writes: >> > >> >> I notice 'octave 4.0.2' has 'openssl@1.0.2h' as one of its inputs. As >> >> far as I know, gplv3 is incompatible with openssl license >> >> (https://people.gnome.org/~markmc/openssl-and-the-gpl.html). >> > >> > Looks like you’re right. Other projects add a special openSSL linking >> > exception, but Octave does not seem to account for this. >> > >> >> How should we fix this? >> > >> > It seems that the use of openssl in Octave is optional, so we could >> > probably just remove it. From a cursory look it appears that it is used >> > for not much more than the MD5 algorithm. Would you like to submit a >> > patch that removes openssl from the inputs? >> > >> Here it is. It takes a long time to track down that curl is pulling the >> openssl depedency. I also upgrade octave to 4.0.3 and change to use >> 'tar.xz'. >> >> > It would be good to ask the Octave project if it would be possible to >> > replace OpenSSL with, say, GnuTLS. >> > >> I agree, should we CC/forward this discussion to octave-devel list? > > Yes, I think we should work with them to resolve this issue.
