Re: [PATCH] Add support for OpenSSL's libcrypto as crypto backend

[Thomas Horsten <thomas horsten com>]

On 9 April 2010 00:48, Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com> wrote:

On Thu, 2010-04-08 at 19:16 +0100, Thomas Horsten wrote:
> For legal compliance and certification reasons it can be useful to use
> a specific cryptographic backend in a product with NetworkManager.

Unfortunately, it's illegal to combine OpenSSL with GPL code unless the
code has specifically added an OpenSSL exception (NetworkManager does
not have such an exception).  So while I greatly appreciate the work
that you've done, I feel very uneasy about accepting a patch that when
enabled, would make distribution of the result illegal :(

I'm a bit confused about this now - although the COPYING file in the libnm-utils is GPLv2, the headers of the source files for the library all have LGPL and not GPL, and so it should be fine to link with OpenSSL. I'm not sure though, and I don't know the history of NetworkManager well enough to see through what's going on here, so any clarification would be appreciated.

If the library is indeed LGPL though, I don't see a problem with including the OpenSSL backend.

Thomas