OpenVPN 2.4/3.x

• Contributor license agreement (CLA)
  • This is required to get OpenVPN to Apple AppStore and possibly other stores (Windows Marketplace?) due to their incompatibility with the AGPLv3 license
  • We need to minimize the scope of the agreement (see below)
  • Android contributor license agreements look fairly good and we can assume lots of legal expertise and resources have been thrown at them

• Permissing licensing
  • At this point it's not clear if use of a permissive license would fully negate the need for a CLA
  • BSD/Mit/Apache licenses
  • If OpenVPN 3.0 was released under a permissive license, there would be the risk that (big) companies might fork it, and we'd end up with tons of probably incompatible forks
    • One way to combat this potential fragmentation would be to standardize the OpenVPN protocol
    • There would be significant overhead in managing the standardization

• Minizing the scope of the CLA
  • This minimizes the risk of fragmentation, forks and loss of contributions
  • Maximize the possibility of extending OpenVPN using isolating APIs
    • Plugins and such would not be covered by the CLA
  • OpenVPN 2.x extension mechanisms
    • The plugin API
    • Management interface
    • SSL library abstraction
    • Platform support (isolated by #ifdefs
  • OpenVPN 3.x extension mechanisms
    • SSL library abstraction
    • ... and others
  • We could possibly split the server-side code from the client-side code, in which case only the client-side code would be covered by the CLA

• Public release date for OpenVPN 3.x codebase
  • There is an old tar.gz source packages available
  • James will try to release this in next couple of weeks

• Future of OpenVPN 2.x
  • We will need to keep 2.x around until 3.x is a (near) complete replacement for 2.x
    • This will probably mean releasing at least 2.4, and possibly 2.5