Hi all - A licensing question about syslog-ng was sent to me privately recently and I thought it would be best to forward it to this list for comments.
We have been using syslog-ng-1.6.2 in our product for quite a few years now. We received a case recently on syslog-ng which prompted us to get the newer version of syslog-ng. We took the syslog-ng_3.0.2 open source edition and replaced the older one with this.
We see that the licensing has changed from GPL to BalaBit Proprietary License since syslog-ng version 3.0.1. The license remains GPL till syslog-ng version 2.1.4.
My question here is, can we build the newer open source syslog-ng which has the Balabit propriety license and distribute it to our customers as part of our product?
I replied that the COPYING file in the 3.0.2 tarball says GPL, so I don't understand the question. The person's reply was:
Joe,
I missed out on mentioning that part to you. The COPYING is GPL. But in the spec file we see the following.
# # Specfile used by BalaBit internally. # Summary: Next generation system logging daemon Name: syslog-ng Version: 3.0.1 Release: 1 License: BalaBit Proprietary License
And this is seen when you do rpm -qi :
[root@n10 ~]# rpm -qi syslog-ng-xx-3.0.2-1 Name : syslog-ng-xx Relocations: (not relocatable) Version : 3.0.2 Vendor: Balabit IT Ltd. Release : 1 Build Date: Mon 07 Dec 2009 06:40:22 PM IST Install Date: Thu 10 Dec 2009 02:01:43 PM IST Build Host: builder.mycompany.com Group : System Environment/Daemons Source RPM: syslog-ng-xx-3.0.2-1.src.rpm Size : 554028 License: BalaBit Proprietary License Signature : (none) Packager : Tamas Pal <folti@balabit.com> URL : http://www.balabit.com Summary : Next generation system logging daemon Description : Syslog-ng is a next generation system logger daemon which provides more capabilities and it has a more flexible configuration then the traditional syslog daemon.