Comments on: Truecrypt: Open Source or not? http://michael-prokop.at/blog/2008/12/12/truecrypt-open-source-or-not/ ... and even if no one reads it Tue, 30 Apr 2013 15:44:04 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1 By: Andrew Cady http://michael-prokop.at/blog/2008/12/12/truecrypt-open-source-or-not/comment-page-1/#comment-13998 Andrew Cady Sat, 13 Dec 2008 21:05:35 +0000 http://michael-prokop.at/blog/?p=975#comment-13998 The part of the license which is a problem is not the part that you have put in bold, but rather this clause, particularly the part of it I have bolded:

provided that the third party overtly accepts and agrees to be bound by all terms and conditions

Actually I don’t think even this can to be criticized for being “non real open source” or “just providing free access to the source” — it only requires “overt agreement to be bound” to what otherwise would be implicit in copyright. It still legally allows redistributing with modifications, but it certainly makes legal redistributing prohibitively impractical (not to mention code reuse).

It seems conceptually not unlike a version of the GPL which would require everyone to sign a paper contract, rather than be implicitly bound by copyright. It is not non-free, it is just impossible.

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