Subject: SSH 2.0 license; looks like 2.0 won't allow non-education use
To: None <current-users@netbsd.org>
From: Rob Healey <rhealey@norstar.com>
List: current-users
Date: 10/12/1998 11:08:22
Has anybody taken a close look at the SSH 2.0 license? In a nutshell
it appears that unless you are a student at a University the public
source use is prohibited; i.e. you have to get the commercial version.
Particularly interesting is that you can't connect up to a commercial
entity with the public version unless you are a student downloading
work; i.e. an ISP is a commercial entity as is any other entity
that pays salerys, i.e. a non-profit organization would fall under
the paying salery dept.
Offhand it sounds like cdrom.com couldn't even use it let alone any
of the organizations that package up freeware CDROM's; they probably
pay people to do the packaging and thus fall under commercial catagory.
Given the 2.0 license, care should be taken that the 2.0 version
doesn't
get onto any of the archives or CDROM's. It's not clear what patches
in the pkg area would do either since the patched 2.0 would be a
derived work...
This seems kinda stinky since they expect the freeware world to fix
and debug their commercial product while forcing the same people
who would be providing fixes to buy the commercial version! It's
not clear if the commercial version is source or binary either.
Anyways, has anyone else looked in to this yet? Should care be taken
to avoid the 2.0 version in the distribution and/or pkg (patch issue)
so sticky legal dragons don't rear their heads?
-Rob