KSSL based S/MIME plugin available

Ingo Klöcker kloecker at kde.org
Sat May 17 17:21:53 BST 2003


On Saturday 17 May 2003 06:50, Waldo Bastian wrote:
> On Saturday 17 May 2003 00:12, Ingo Klöcker wrote:
> > As this isn't a KMail specific problem (kssl is in kdelibs/kio) and
> > as kde-licensing has vanished (at least
> > http://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo doesn't know anything about
> > this mailing list) I move this discussion to kde-core-devel.
> >
> > Is there a license problem with OpenSSL or not?
>
> OpenSSL comes with advertisement clauses that might cause problems
> yes: "3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this
> software *    must display the following acknowledgement:
>  *    "This product includes cryptographic software written by
>  *     Eric Young (eay at cryptsoft.com)"
> and
>  * 3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this
>  *    software must display the following acknowledgment:
>  *    "This product includes software developed by the OpenSSL
> Project *    for use in the OpenSSL Toolkit.
> (http://www.openssl.org/)"
>
> One could be of the opinion that this puts a legal obligation on
> applications like e.g. KMail. The question whether KMail is a derived
> work of OpenSSL is irrelevant in that respect since the license only
> speaks of "use of this software". I think it's the opinion of the FSF
> that such additional obligation is incompatible with the GPL.

And also incompatible with the LGPL I assume. Else one could simply 
write an LGPL'd wrapper library and then use this in a GPL program. But 
isn't that exactly what Konqueror does by using kssl? If there is no 
licensing problem between Konqueror and OpenSSL then there can't be a 
problem with KMail (resp. the kssl based S/MIME plugin) since both use 
OpenSSL through kssl. Am I missing something?

Regards,
Ingo

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