Security OpenSSL Licensing Changes

eva2000 · Mar 25, 2017

Interesting developments going on with OpenSSL's change in licensing to Apache Software License, v2
Inside OpenSSL's battle to change its license: Coders' rights, tech giants, patents and more

The software is licensed under the OpenSSL License, which includes its own terms and those dating back to the preceding SSLeay license.

Those driving the project announced plans to shift to a new license in 2015 and now the thousand or so people who have contributed code over the years have started receiving email messages asking them to grant permission to relicense their contributions under the Apache Software License, version 2.

Theo De Raadt, founder of OpenBSD, a contributor to OpenSSL, and creator of a LibreSSL – forked from OpenSSL in 2014 – expressed dissatisfaction with the relicensing campaign in a mailing list post, criticizing OpenSSL for failing to consult its community of authors.
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For years, OpenSSL went largely unappreciated, until the Heartbleed vulnerability surfaced in 2014 and shamed the large companies that depend on the software for online security to contribute funds and code.

The planned licensing change comes with the endorsement of Intel and Oracle, among the companies that pledged $3.9 million to the Linux Foundation as atonement. A portion of that funding transformed OpenSSL into something more than the shoe-string operation it had been for years.

Rich Salz, a member of the OpenSSL development team and senior architect at Akamai Technologies, in a phone interview with The Register, said that in the year before Heartbleed, two people were responsible for almost all of the changes being incorporated into OpenSSL. Now there are at least 150 contributing and making pull requests, he said.
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