Sun donates elliptic curve code to OpenSSL?

[Ben Laurie]

Markus Friedl wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 23, 2002 at 02:50:20PM +0100, Ben Laurie wrote:
> 
>>>(1) they promise not to sue Sun for infringing any of their own patents 
>>>which might
>>>cover the use of the donated code
>>>
>>>(2) don't modify Sun's code as provided by Sun, don't use only parts of 
>>>the donated code,
>>>and don't remove the license text from the code.
>>
>>Note that if you don't want to be bound by Sun's licence, there's a flag 
>>to remove all their donated code (at least, there's supposed to be, I 
>>haven't checked).
> 
> 
> This is a very bad move, especially since the code and
> copyright in question are spread all over the source tree.
> so a flag does not really help.  You still have
> to 'use' the source files for building libssl.

Actually, the flag does help (and it defaults off, I'm told).

> With this code OpenSSL is turning into a non-free project.
> 
> Thank you very much.
> 
> Thank you for moving patent litigation licenses into OpenSSL.

As has been observed elsewhere, the patent stuff only applies if you 
make a similar promise to Sun. If you don't want to have Sun not sue you 
when you infringe, then don't promise not to sue them.

Have you actually read the licence?

Cheers,

Ben.

-- 
http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html       http://www.thebunker.net/

"There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he
doesn't mind who gets the credit." - Robert Woodruff


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