[openbeos] Re: Libraries

And this is a fairly ugly case...

OpenSSL is under an old style BSD license - requiring mention in whatever 
eventual documentation comes about. This isn't necessarily so bad for us, but 
the creeping feeling that I have is that we could have something of a licensing 
issue for people who want to make distributions. Our code is all MIT. Other 
code that we have in CVS is GPL, LGPL, etc. None of this is an issue for US, as 
we have it set up so that anyone can get the source. 

But let's say that Joe DistroMaker comes along and wants to make a distribution 
of some sort available. Unless he strips out all of the GPL'ed code, he has to 
either make it available on his website or include a written offer to send out 
the code. Not to mention that he has to include AT LEAST OpenSSL in his 
documentation.

It seems to me that as the completion of R1 approaches (or, at least, the point 
at which we are unlikely to bring too many more packages into the tree), we 
should probably do a license sweep and be able to alert distro makers on what 
the situation is. Not that it is our legal responsibility, but because any 
misery on the community is our misery too.

I think that OpenSSL should come into our tree, despite the licensing issue. It 
was brought up to me before that it should come in, but at that point, it was 
"just" feature creep. Now that it is necessary to support something basic that 
R5 supports (email), I think that we should include it. For people to be unable 
to read their email out of the box would be pretty tough to explain away...

On 2005-01-30 at 13:10:28 [-0500], Nathan Whitehorn wrote:
> Michael Phipps noted in an e-mail yesterday that we want the tree to be 
> self-contained, to give a full-working basic distro when built, to which 
> other files could be added. At least one piece of code in the tree, however, 
> (the MDR protocol add-ons) depend on code that is not there â OpenSSL. I've 
> arranged the build system so that they will, by default, be built without SSL 
> support, but this seems to break the core distribution philosophy, as it 
> requires recompiling in special circumstances to get full functionality. 
> Should libraries like OpenSSL be placed in the tree?
> -Nathan

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