> now is it? All it restricts is your ability to advertise: i.e. if you
> advertise yourself, you must also advertise us. A bit like a GPL for the
> PR space :-)
>
> But copying, distributing and modifying are utterly unaffected by this
> clause.
>
> This seems to me to be not only compatible, but entirely fair.
It is certainly fair enough, but still incompatible. While your advertsing
clause is harmless (and any developer worth his salt would mention the
origin of 3rd party components anyway, regardless of such a clause,
_especially_ when it is free!), there are other advertising clauses which
can be quite blatant and nobody would like to have them incorporated in
their project.
I see it this way: openSSL is a great product, very high in demand. The main
"client" is the free software community. There, the GPL is pretty much the
standard now. Make no mistakes: the GPL is there to protect _your_ efforts,
to make sure that your donation of source will remain a donation for anybody
forever, even if it goes through countless permutations performed by others.
The GPL may force others to go "free" as well, if they are desperate enough
to use the free quality GPL'd code. Most other licensing schemes don't offer
this benefit.
I for my part would love to use openSSL in our medical project - but it
looks as if we can't, due to this licensing problem. We will have to "roll
our own", which is stupid and will cost us several months of development
time. However, we do not want to loose our efforts to commercial vultures -
we need our software and all its descendants to remain free for the sake of
free knowledge access in medicine - and no other licensing scheme but the
GPL gives us that protection.
Horst
coordinator gnumed project
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