Am 14.01.2023 um 20:57 schrieb James Bottomley:
On Sat, 2023-01-14 at 18:29 +0100, Arne Schwabe wrote:
Hey,
This is the first round and will be only to the openvpn-devel list.
After that I will also write to individuals email addresses but I
want to start with sending this to the devel list.
We are writing to you since you are or were a contributor in past to
OpenVPN and we would like to ask for your permission to amend the
license of OpenVPN.
OpenVPN 2.x is licensed under the GPL v2. This license has served us
well in the past and we are not trying to change that. However,
changes in licenses of our dependencies make this change necessary.
Both mbed TLS and OpenSSL nowadays use the Apache 2.x license. For
the OpenSSL library we have a special exception that allows us
linking with it. For newer mbed TLS version, we cannot do this any
more.
I think there's been a misunderstanding here: there's no barrier to
*linking* any GPLv2 licensed program with a system library whatever the
library licence is.
mbed TLS is not a system library. Also for platforms like Android,
Windows and macOS we are shipping OpenSSL and mbed TLS ourselves since
they are NOT provided by the system.
This dates back to the earliest days of the GNU
project when the initial design was for all the GNU tools to be built
and run on proprietary UNIX system regardless of system library licence
(which was always proprietary), and is specifically what the GPL system
library exception was designed to cover.
Compatibility of Apache 2.x and GPL 2.x has to our knowledge never
been tested in court and even FSF and ASF disagree about the issue
(https://www.apache.org/licenses/GPL-compatibility.html)
That's talking about compatibility when cutting and pasting code or
including source files from an Apache licensed project into a GPLv2
licensed project, it definitely isn't talking about linking them
together.
If you or anyone else needs an Open Source counsel to give advice to
the OpenVPN project about these differences and the standard practice
today, I can arrange for that to happen.
That what you saying it contrary to what I have seen. Can you give a
source that states that combining GPL2 and Apache2 into one binary and
shipping that is legal?
Arne
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