Possible License issue with XtraBackup

[Daniël van Eeden]

It looks like XtraBackup as distributed in binary form by Percona is build with -DWITH_SSL=system which means it is linked against OpenSSL.

storage/innobase/xtrabackup/COPYING seems to indicate XtraBackup is GPLv2 licensed.

This combination might be an issue:
https://people.gnome.org/~markmc/openssl-and-the-gpl.html
https://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html (Question 28)
https://lintian.debian.org/tags/possible-gpl-code-linked-with-openssl.html

[Daniël van Eeden (dveeden)]

Looks to be introduced by https://github.com/percona/percona-xtrabackup/commit/3766cd5eb307a9601c4803159430bd088c1da120

[Sergei Glushchenko (sergei.glushchenko)]

Percona Server is linked with GPL as well and I believe MySQL is linked with OpenSSL too

[Daniël van Eeden (dveeden)]

"MySQL Community Edition binary distributions are compiled using yaSSL"
Source: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/openssl-versus-yassl.html

As far as I know the reason the community edition is compiled against YaSSL is this incompatibility. Enterprise Edition is compiled against OpenSSL, that is possible because enterprise edition is not GPL.

[Vadim Tkachenko (vadim-tk)]

Dynamic linking against OpenSSL is a complex topic.
For example Fedora says
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing:FAQ?rd=Licensing/FAQ#What.27s_the_deal_with_the_OpenSSL_license.3F
"However, we consider that the OpenSSL library is a system library, as defined by the GPL, on Fedora and therefore we are allowed to ship GPL software that links to the OpenSSL library."

On Centos 7 we also can see:

 yum install mariadb-server

 ldd /usr/libexec/mysqld
        linux-vdso.so.1 => (0x00007ffe4bfae000)
        libpthread.so.0 => /lib64/libpthread.so.0 (0x00007fbecaf2f000)
        libaio.so.1 => /lib64/libaio.so.1 (0x00007fbecad2d000)
        libz.so.1 => /lib64/libz.so.1 (0x00007fbecab16000)
        libcrypt.so.1 => /lib64/libcrypt.so.1 (0x00007fbeca8df000)
        libdl.so.2 => /lib64/libdl.so.2 (0x00007fbeca6db000)
        libssl.so.10 => /lib64/libssl.so.10 (0x00007fbeca46c000)
        libcrypto.so.10 => /lib64/libcrypto.so.10 (0x00007fbeca082000)
        libstdc++.so.6 => /lib64/libstdc++.so.6 (0x00007fbec9d79000)
        libm.so.6 => /lib64/libm.so.6 (0x00007fbec9a76000)
        libc.so.6 => /lib64/libc.so.6 (0x00007fbec96b5000)
        /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007fbecc900000)
        libfreebl3.so => /lib64/libfreebl3.so (0x00007fbec94b2000)
        libgssapi_krb5.so.2 => /lib64/libgssapi_krb5.so.2 (0x00007fbec9263000)
        libkrb5.so.3 => /lib64/libkrb5.so.3 (0x00007fbec8f7c000)
        libcom_err.so.2 => /lib64/libcom_err.so.2 (0x00007fbec8d78000)
        libk5crypto.so.3 => /lib64/libk5crypto.so.3 (0x00007fbec8b45000)
        libgcc_s.so.1 => /lib64/libgcc_s.so.1 (0x00007fbec892f000)
        libkrb5support.so.0 => /lib64/libkrb5support.so.0 (0x00007fbec871f000)
        libkeyutils.so.1 => /lib64/libkeyutils.so.1 (0x00007fbec851b000)
        libresolv.so.2 => /lib64/libresolv.so.2 (0x00007fbec8301000)
        libselinux.so.1 => /lib64/libselinux.so.1 (0x00007fbec80d9000)
        libpcre.so.1 => /lib64/libpcre.so.1 (0x00007fbec7e78000)

 rpm -qf /lib64/libssl.so.10
openssl-libs-1.0.1e-60.el7.x86_64

[Daniël van Eeden (dveeden)]

> Dynamic linking against OpenSSL is a complex topic.

Looks like that's going to change:
https://www.openssl.org/blog/blog/2017/03/20/license/

[Shahriyar Rzayev (rzayev-sehriyar)]

Percona now uses JIRA for bug reports so this bug report is migrated to: https://jira.percona.com/browse/PXB-1428