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 on this matter.
Cheers,
Stef
