TrueCrypt licensing concern

Ben Finney ben+freedesktop at benfinney.id.au
Tue Oct 7 15:03:21 PDT 2008


James Westby <jw+debian at jameswestby.net> writes:

> On Tue, 2008-10-07 at 11:05 -0400, Tom "spot" Callaway wrote:
> > Recently, we had a request to add TrueCrypt to Fedora, and as part of
> > that, we did due diligence on the license. What our legal counsel
> > discovered was truly horrifying: not only was the license non-free, it
> > almost certainly opens the user and the distributor to serious risk of
> > legal action from the copyright holder, even if all conditions of the
> > license are met.
> 
> Also of interest is the Debian RFP
> 
>   http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=364034
> 
> with links to the debian-legal discussion on the package.

Which seems to come to a contradictory conclusion
<URL:http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2006/07/msg00009.html>; i.e.
that the license *is* free under the DFSG. (On a quick reading, I
incline more toward the “non-free” side, but that's not something to
be discussed at length here.)

I'd very much like to see Tom Calloway's reference for *why* the
license terms are such a serious risk; preferably, placed in (or
linked from) the Fedora wiki page where the work is forbidden.

-- 
 \         “Pinky, are you pondering what I'm pondering?” “I think so, |
  `\         Brain, but isn't a cucumber that small called a gherkin?” |
_o__)                                           —_Pinky and The Brain_ |
Ben Finney



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