tcplay: BSD-licensed alternative to TrueCrypt

[Tom Callaway]

On 10/06/2011 04:54 PM, Richard Shaw wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 6, 2011 at 3:28 PM, T.C. Hollingsworth
> <tchollingsworth at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Thu, Oct 6, 2011 at 4:54 AM, Richard Shaw <hobbes1069 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> If I remember correctly it's not that TrueCrypt is non-free, but that
>>> the license is incompatible with Fedora and upstream was not willing
>>> to budge on that so it was re-branded instead.
>>
>> The TrueCrypt License is, in fact, non-free for several reasons:
>> http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/distributions/2008-October/000276.html
> 
> That's being rather pedantic... Yes it's considered non-free because
> of the screwy licensing agreement, however, the software is free to
> download and use, it is open source.

TrueCrypt is definitely not Free Software. A simple rebranding to
prevent use of their trademark is not sufficient to make it Free
Software. It is also not Open Source, as it fails several of the OSI
Open Source Definition criteria.

In addition, I have strong reason to believe that the license in
TrueCrypt is carefully crafted to incorporate legal conditions where the
TrueCrypt upstream could do all sorts of really really nasty and
horrible things, including suing users for _complying_ with the terms of
the license. When I pointed this out to TrueCrypt's upstream in 2008,
their answer was basically "Yeah, so what?".

Stand far, far, far away.

~tom

==
Fedora Project