Seeking Last Group of Contributors

The following is a press release that we just put out about how finishing off our relicensing effort. For the impatient, please see https://license.openssl.org/trying-to-find to help us find the last people; we want to change the license with our next release, which is currently in Alpha, and tentatively set for May.

For background, you can see all posts in the license tag.

One copy of the press release is at https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/openssl-seeking-last-group-of-contributors-300607162.html.

Removing some code

This is another update on our effort to re-license the OpenSSL software. Our previous post in March was about the launch of our effort to reach all contributors, with the hope that they would support this change.

So far, about 40% of the people have responded. For a project that is as old as OpenSSL (including its predecessor, SSLeay, it’s around 20 years) that’s not bad. We’ll be continuing our efforts over the next couple of months to contact everyone.

Of those people responding, the vast majority have been in favor of the license change – less then a dozen objected. This post describes what we’re doing about those and how we came to our conclusions. The goal is to be very transparent and open with our processes.

Licensing Update

The following is a press release that we just released, with the cooperation and financial support of the Core Infrastructure Initiative and the Linux Foundation.

In the next few days we’ll start sending out email to all contributors asking them to approve the change. In the meantime, you can visit the licensing website and search for your name and request the email. If you have changed email addresses, or want to raise other issues about the license change, please email license@openssl.org. You can also post general issues to openssl-users@openssl.org.

We are grateful to all the contributors who have contributed to OpenSSL and look forward to their help and support in this effort.

The official press release can be found at the CII website. The rest of this post is a copy:

License Agreements and changes are coming

The OpenSSL license is rather unique and idiosyncratic. It reflects views from when its predecessor, SSLeay, started twenty years ago. As a further complication, the original authors were hired by RSA in 1998, and the code forked into two versions: OpenSSL and RSA BSAFE SSL-C. (See Wikipedia for discussion.) I don’t want get into any specific details, and I certainly don’t know them all.

Things have evolved since then, and open source is an important part of the landscape – the Internet could not exist without it. There are good reasons why Microsoft is a founding member of the Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII).

Our plan is to update the license to the Apache License version 2.0. We are in consultation with various corporate partners, the CII, and the legal experts at the Software Freedom Law Center. In other words, we have a great deal of expertise and interest at our fingertips.