Re: TODO: GNU TLS

Stephen Frost wrote:
>> My understanding is that most of the 
>> non-FSF lawyers who have looked at this think it's not a problem. I am 
>> not a lawyer, and AFAIK neither are you. Maybe we all need to stop 
>> playing Perry Mason and take some well informed legal advice.
>>     
>
> I'm certainly not a lawyer and I'd be astounded if anyone felt I
> represented myself as such.  I don't have opinions from any lawyers
> beyond Tom's comments previously from RH's legal team and FSF's comments
> on the issue.  I don't know where the 'most of the non-FSF lawyers'
> claim comes from, if you're aware of others who have commented on it I'd
> be happy to listen to them.  

I said that was my understanding, not that I had direct knowledge of it. 
But maybe I'm wrong.

> I do know that this has been an issue for
> Debian for quite some time and it seems rather unlikely that Debian's
> position on it will change.  SPI does have a pro-bono lawyer but I
> don't know that this question has been posed to him, probably because
> the general consensus among the Debian Powers that Be is that it is an
> issue and we try to not bother our pro-bono lawyer too much (being, uh,
> pro-bono and all).
>   

I have a sneaking suspicion that there are some hidden agendas in all this.

I agree with this comment from Steve Langasek at 
http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2003/01/msg00022.html :

> Sure, code can be rewritten to use gnutls natively.  But I don't
> understand why anyone would consider this a useful expenditure of
> developer resources when the necessary OpenSSL compat glue could simply
> be made available under the LGPL.
>
>   

If this is such an issue, why hasn't somebody done that?

cheers

andrew