Truecrypt license troubles
Currently I use truecrypt to encrypt private data. Reading the section on truecrypt spawns many questions. The main two issues are:
Q: What is wrong with the license?
A: Short answer, lots. With every major revision of the TrueCrypt license, it becomes less risky, but it is still non-free. We are hopeful that a discussion between TrueCrypt and the FSF will help resolve the remaining issues, but this has yet to occur.
Q: Maybe a pointer to the discussion or a summary of the discussion is in order
A: An older discussion is here: http://www.mail-archive.com/distributions@lists.freedesktop.org/msg00274.html
Q: What alternatives could (easily) replace truecrypt?
A: Sorry, this is not my area of expertise.
Q: Would it be possible to spawn a new truecrypt and have a different license?
A: No.
Q: For instance could someone change it to being GPL-ed?
A: Only the TrueCrypt copyright holders could choose to do that, and they have never done so (afaik).
Q: Or is that one of the problems?
A: Strictly speaking, it is not one of the problems. The fact that the license is non-free is the primary problem.
Thank you for answering these questions. So, in summary, either the truecrypt guys go talk with FSF or we need to find an alternative.
Community Participation
Whats the purpose of this section? It kinda makes a setup for the joke of "Community Participation is a forbidden item in fedora". Should be removed or at least placed higher up in the page with a better explanation of relevance.
ndiswrapper claims
"NDISwrapper does not work at all without the Windows drivers, which 1) are not redistributable, and therefore cannot be shipped in Fedora, and 2) are not open source, and therefore will not be shipped in Fedora."
This statement indicts ndiswrapper, based upon the purported licenses of "the windows drivers". The latter set is not defined. If there exists even one redistributable, open-source windows driver, then this indictment is wrong.