Federico Schwindt wrote:
hrm, i particulary enjoy this NEWS part:
* getopt.c and getopt1.c removed due to license incompatibility with OpenSSL.
since now fetchmail doesn't compile as is in systems w/o getopt_long
(like everything but linux afaik).
Yes, I found that interesting too.
i don't understand why this was removed. afaik, openssl is BSD, and
the getopt code looks GPL.
i don't want to start a license discussion but rather fix this annoying
issue.
Well, the problem is the licensing, so it's hard to avoid at least a
bit of license discussion. Yes, OpenSSL is BSD-licensed, and getopt
is GPL. The problem is that The original BSD license (which OpenSSL
has) includes the advertising clause, which is incompatible with the
GPL. For details, see: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html
It seems that in recent weeks a lot of people have suddenly noticed
that the OpenSSL license is incompatible with the GPL, and a lot of
SSL-modified programs have had to lose their SSL capabilities in order
be be legal. (Obviously many people add those capabilities back in
for their own use.) I've especially noticed this since I run Debian,
which is picky about these things.
My next thought is, all of fetchmail is covered by the GPL, so why
are only the getopt files considered conflicting. My guess is that as
copyright holder, ESR can link fetchmail with anything, but the FSF is
the copyright holder for the getopt files. ESR, your comments here
would be appreciated.
I do wonder if the getopt files might fall under the GPL's exception
for things normally included with the OS, but I may not be remembering
the clause well.
Solutions? I would think that first of all fetchmail needs to work
without getopt_long (and therefore without long options) if it's
distributed without getopt_long, but I don't have time right now to
write that patch.
I understand that there's a GPL SSL project now, which might solve the
problem by replacing OpenSSL and its annoying license.
Or maybe someone could rewrite getopt_long under a license compatible
with OpenSSL. Though that seems slightly silly to me, considering the
context.
--
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