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Subject: Re: [pkcs11] Groups - PKCS #11 V2.30 header files uploaded
On 30.05.2013 03:44, Tim Hudson wrote: > (had to extract the email from my spam folder ...) > > On 30/05/2013 11:00 AM, Wan-Teh Chang wrote: >> This license is believed to be incompatible with the GPL. > > To be more complete in the statement - some people claim that it *might > be incompatible *with the GPL but no one has actually demonstrated how > or why this is actually the case and there has been no actual legal view > point from anyone who is a lawyer in the open source community. Here's how I as the maintainer of several open source projects using pkcs11 headers have had to approach the issue: The introduction of additional restrictions makes a license incompatible with the GPL. The must-mention-RSA-in-derived-work clause is such an additional restriction. The original 4 clause BSD license had a similar clause, and was not GPL compatible. You can read the FSF's information about that here: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#OriginalBSD I have used/installed RSA provided PKCS#11 header files in the open source projects I maintain, and they have not accepted by the open source community until the licensing issue was rectified. This has happened a couple times to my projects. Thus I now use a reimplementation of the header files provided by the GnuPG project. An additional benefit is that it is a single header file. The above may be incorrect in your view, but that does not change the effect that this must-mention-RSA clause has on open source projects using the RSA provided license: With the exception of NSS (which has a complex multiple license scheme), most GPL compatible open source projects currently cannot and/or do not use the RSA provided PKCS#11 header files. In order to provide a more substantive answer to this question, I have written licensing@fsf.org on this matter. Cheers, Stef
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