Re: A couple of questions and concerns about Emacs network security

[Paul Eggert]

Richard Stallman wrote:
> OpenSSL had, in the past, a license incompatible with the GNU GPL.
> If its license is unchanged, using it with Emacs would require some
> inconvenient work to install a license exception.

The OpenSSL project announced in 2015 its intent to switch to the Apache 2.0 
license, which is compatible with the GPL v3 that Emacs uses. Switching involves 
contacting hundreds of contributors and getting their permission, and removing 
code contributed by the few who disagree. At last report in March 
<https://www.openssl.org/blog/blog/2018/03/01/last-license/> this process had 
covered 99.8% of commits to OpenSSL, and the intent was to make the license 
change in the next release, which has not happened yet. So although we're still 
not quite there yet as far as Emacs using OpenSSL on Debian goes, the licensing 
issue looks like it will be resolved in the not-too-distant future.