Re: [LINUX5250] GPL vs. OpenSSL license

[Scott Klement <klemscot@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 5 Feb 2002, Steve Fox wrote:
>
> On Mon, 2002-02-04 at 17:48, Carey Evans wrote:
> > Sorry to be the bearer of bad news about laws etc. again, but I've
> > realised that, due to the interaction between the advertising clause
> > in the OpenSSL license (conditions 3 and 6), and section 6 of the GNU
> > GPL, nobody is actually allowed to distribute binaries of tn5250.
>
> Why not use Netscape Security Services (NSS) for SSL support like
> Evolution (the GNOME PIM)
> <http://www.ximian.com/products/ximian_evolution/> does? They are
> cross-platform, and licensed under the MPL, GPL, and LGPL (take your
> pick :)
>
> See http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/pki/nss/ for details.
>

Well... that WOULD solve the license issue.  A few things I'd like to
point out about using the NSS, however:

 -- NSS requires the Netscape Portable Runtime (NSPR) as well as the
      Netscape Build Environment...   This would make it somewhat more
      complicated to build the emulator.

 -- I know that FreeBSD ships with OpenSSL.  I believe the Linuxes do
      too...  So setting up OpenSSL is a non-issue for us Un*x people.

 -- To build NSS on Windows requires both Cygwin and MS Visual C++.
      Cygwin isn't that big of a deal, it complicates the setup
      instructions but at least it's open source.  MSVC however is
      not.  It's at least USD$ 500!

 -- I'd have to re-write sslstream.c completely (which isn't that
      big of a deal) and I'd have to make the win32 code work with
      MSVC (unless, of course, we wanted to require both MinGW and MSVC)

So... wow, that adds a lot of extra work in setting up our build
environment.  And makes our free emulator somewhat expensive for Windows
users.

All this because we love the GPL so much?