[Asterisk-Dev] gnu-tls

[Craig Southeren]

On Thu, 7 Jul 2005 10:14:19 +0300
Tzafrir Cohen <tzafrir.cohen at xorcom.com> wrote:

..deleted

> On Thu, Jul 07, 2005 at 12:14:58PM +1200, Derek Smithies wrote:
> 
> > 
> > Even assuming the license of the parts of gnu-tls that we want are LGPL, 
> > there are 2 issues I would mention.
> > 
> >    The wording of the LGPL has been described as "Tricky" and the meaning 
> >    is definately up for debate. If us computer experts argue the 
> >    meaning, what will a court decide ?
> 
> Huh? What problems? Any reason why companies like Sun chose to use GTK
> as the binding for their GUI a couple of years ago if the license was so
> questionable? Please quote a decent source. 

For a discussion of possible philosophical problems with the LGPL, see:

"Why you shouldn't use the Library GPL for your next library",  by
Richard Stallman at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html

I'd call that reasonably definitive :)

As for license issues, there have been many discussed over the years in
various projects. They mostly revolve around para 6 of the LGPL.

As a simple example, para 6 clause b) requires that any derived work
that uses the library that is not itself GPL-compatible must use a
"shared library mechanism" in order to use the code. 

While this is fine for a fully open source project, what about if
someone wants to create a commercial version of Asterisk (using an
appropriate license from Digium) on a platform that does not have shared
libraries? Tough luck - you can't do it.

Is this scenario a big deal? Maybe not - but it's not a trivial decision
to make either.

There are many other issues that have been discussed elsewhere.

> The license of OpenSSL is certainly problematic.

Turnabout is fair play :) 

Please describe the issues you see with the OpenSSL license. It's non
viral, allows binary and source use with attribution. What's the problem?

> Is there any problem with the gtkgui? 

No idea. My guess is that it is a totally different situation.

> >   What will asterisk gain by switching to gnu-tls ? Are there verifiable 
> >   flaws in the current openssl codebase ? If there are no verifiable 
> >   flaws, we would swap one working system for another working system. With 
> >   no gain in overall performance. A waste of effort in my view.
> 
> Not switching. Allow linking with it as well. Just as I don't suggest
> that we switch to FreeBSD, Solaris or OSX's libc.

Not sure why you bring this up, but it sounds like a good decision :)

   Craig

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