[gnutls-dev]GPL/LGPL license changes

[Nikos Mavroyanopoulos]

On Thu, May 16, 2002 at 08:56:36PM +0100, Andrew McDonald wrote:

> Hi,

> As I understand it libgnutls is now LGPL, unless it is built with SRP
> or OpenPGP support, in which case it is GPL. I guess that one
> consequence of this is that any application can use gnutls (where they
> might have used OpenSSL before), but only get the 'extra features' of
> gnutls when they are GPL licensed (and opencdk is still GPL licensed
> anyway).
yes, this is the intention.

> However, it seems to me that if a user has the GPL version installed
> then they can only run GPL'ed applications that link with gnutls.
> (Whereas if the LGPL version is installed then any applications under
> any license linking to gnutls can be installed). It means that you
> can't have a GPL'ed application using OpenPGP keys at the same time as
> another application (using basic TLS) under a GPL-incompatible license.
> Was this intended?
No. I'm still working on it.

> If no, one solution would be to have different SONAMES for the GPL and
> LGPL versions, but that seems undesirable. Alternatively, I'm wondering
> if the GPL bits could be moved to an auxilary library. A GPL'ed app
> could then link with libgnutls and libgnutls-extra to be able to use
> SRP and OpenPGP. Any thoughts?
Looks like a nice solution.

> I guess an application can detect OpenPGP support at run time through
> by calling one of the _openpgp_ functions and SRP through one of the
> _srp_ functions. However, would it be useful to have a more formalised
> way of doing this? Also, is there a way to detect at compile time
> whether SRP or OpenPGP support is available?
I've just added the --modules option to libgnutls-config which now prints
the enabled modules. I may remove this, if I finally split the library.
 
> Regards,
> Andrew
> -- 
> Andrew McDonald
> E-mail: andrew@mcdonald.org.uk
> http://www.mcdonald.org.uk/andrew/

-- 
Nikos Mavroyanopoulos
mailto:nmav@gnutls.org