[Box Backup] Box Backup licensing

[Martin Ebourne]

On Wed, 2010-02-03 at 08:30 +0000, James O'Gorman wrote:
> On 2 Feb 2010, at 22:32, Reinhard Tartler wrote:
> 
> > On Di, Feb 02, 2010 at 19:49:52 (CET), James O'Gorman wrote:
> > 
> >> FWIW, a member of the FreeBSD Ports Management team told me there's no
> >> license issue creating binaries linked against readline,
> > 
> > but distributing the resulting binaries remains an issue
> 
> I don't believe so. See the commit messages for revisions 1.8 and 1.9
> of the port:
> http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/ports/sysutils/boxbackup/Makefile#rev1.9

I think there's some very faulty reasoning there.

The OpenSSL licence is incompatible with the GPL because it adds extra
restrictions (advertising requirements) and the GPL doesn't let you do
that. Therefore if you built a binary of both and then distributed it
you'd have to follow both licences, which you can't do by definition.

http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/index_html#GPLIncompatibleLicenses

http://www.fsf.org/licensing/essays/bsd.html

If OpenSSL was provided as a system library but GNU readline was not
then the combination might work, but for an OS distributor this is
unlikely to work. Chris has added an optional exception for OpenSSL to
Box backup but no such exception exists for GNU readline which is GPL.

Cheers,
Martin