`ring` license requires more precautions than others
The ring crate's LICENSE incorporates BoringSSL's license, which incorporates the old1 OpenSSL license, which includes the old 4-clause bsd-style "advertising clause". We use ring
as an optional dependency: we only need it when rustls
is enabled.
* 3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this
* software must display the following acknowledgment:
* "This product includes software developed by the OpenSSL Project
* for use in the OpenSSL Toolkit. (http://www.openssl.org/)"
That gives us three possible burdens:
- We need to conform with the advertising clause.
- We might want to warn others that enabling the
rustls
feature may give them obligations. - We should try to make sure that
ring
never becomes a required dependency, or else we will be GPL-incompatible, which we do not want.
It would be good if we had some way to automatically check that 3 is maintained, either in check_licenses or elsewhere.
-
OpenSSL has since relicensed under Apache-2.0, but that doesn't necessarily help BoringSSL and/or ring unless they confirm that all of the code they copied is code that got relicensed.
↩
Edited by Nick Mathewson