TrueCrypt licensing concern

James Westby jw+debian at jameswestby.net
Tue Oct 7 08:16:38 PDT 2008


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.
> 
> Accordingly, we've blocked TrueCrypt from inclusion in Fedora and marked
> it as one of our "ForbiddenItems".

Thanks for the warning.

Are there any references that you can point to. I can understand
not wanting to post a full assessment of the license, but a list
of the problematic clauses would be good.

Ah, I've just noticed the wiki syntax in which you wrote that.

  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ForbiddenItems#TrueCrypt

which is similar to the answer here.

I'll put a pointer to this thread in the Ubuntu request for
packaging and close it.

  https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/109701

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.

Thanks,

James



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