Re: libofx license

On Tuesday 31 October 2006 02:55, Thomas Viehmann wrote:
> Hi Benoit,
>
> I'm writing to you as the (main) copyright holder of LibOFX
> (I've found yourself, Peter O'Gorman, Ace Jones, Martin Preuss, and
> Kasper Peeters in AUTHORS and copyright notices).
>
> So here is my question: Would you be willing to consider including an
> explicit permission to link your work to OpenSSL?
>
> This may seem a strange request, but here it is:
>
> As you probably know, Martin wrote a banking library AqBanking which can
> make use of LibOFX. Both LibOFX and AqBanking are licensed under the GPL
> and both are packaged in Debian, where I comaintain packages for
> AqBanking. We occasionally receive requests to enable OFX functions in
> AqBanking.
> Unfortunately, as some (notable the Free Software Foundation and Debian)
> deem the GPL as incompatible to the OpenSSL license and as AqBanking
> depends (rather strongly) on OpenSSL, we cannot presently link LibOFX
> into AqBanking.
> Now, you may share or not share this interpretation and I certainly
> neither can nor want to impose any licensing on you, but I would really
> like to include your work into the packaging and so would be very glad
> if you generously granted explicit permission to link to OpenSSL.[1]

Unfortunately, I do share the interpretation that it's impossible to respect 
both licences at the same time without an exception (with some nuances, but 
those nuances do not apply to this specific case).  I fully realize that for 
the end user, not granting an exception means less availability of OFX 
support in the short term, and that granting permission would be very easy 
for me.  But I simply do not want to compound the problem by making OpenSSL's 
advertizing clause even more entrenched, no matter how little difference my 
decision may actually make.  I used to have the opposite viewpoint, but I've 
clearly been proven wrong.

I now feel that having easy workaround for licencing issues since "the user 
just doesn't care" has directly resulted in the lack of developement of truly 
open, full featured drivers for just about all commonly available video and 
wireless cards (though the latter is improving).  When the end users can do 
everything they want if they don't care about licencing (and most don't), the 
developpers don't spend much time working on the alternatives.  I feel we are 
shooting ourselves in the foot in the long run.

Now off course, the sadder thing is that OpenSSL actually IS free software.  
It's too bad that as a community we haven't been able to hamonize all 
copyleft licences with each other, and make all non-copyleft licences 
compatible with all copyleft one.

In this specific case, where there is a mature, full featured and widely 
available alternative (GnuTLS, which even has an OpenSSL compatibility 
layer), I simply cannot see a reason to make an exception.

I truly am sorry to have to say no to a polite and perfectly reasonable 
request,
-- 
Benoit Grégoire
http://benoitg.coeus.ca/
-- 
Benoit Grégoire
http://benoitg.coeus.ca/

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