[JDEV] Peter Gutmann's response

[Corbett J. Klempay]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 30 Apr 1999 12:28:30 (NZST)
From: Peter Gutmann <pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz>
To: cklempay at chimera.acm.jhu.edu
Subject: Re: cryptlib license question...

Hi,

>I am working on adding digital signature support to an in-development instant
>messaging program called Jabber (www.jabber.org). I'm actually doing this as a
>project for my crypto class right now...you can see the brief proposal for it
>at http://www.acm.jhu.edu/~cklempay/mod_digsig/cryptoproposal.html Anyway, I
>was getting frustrated the other when I was working on it, as I was having to
>develop a bunch of the utility code (a PRNG, prime number generation, etc).  I
>went looking for good PRNG code, and came across cryptlib...wow.  It's extra
>cool because of some of the key management (like eventually we were going to
>have to add code to our Jabber servers to store persistent user info (like
>keys) in an RDBMS).  The thing I was realizing this morning, though: if I were
>to use cryptlib to implement these things, it would prevent us from
>distributing Jabber under the GPL, correct?

Well, you couldn't distribute the cryptlib code under the GPL because cryptlib
is currently available under a license which is less restrictive than the GPL,
and I don't really want to have it infected by the GPL (that is, I don't want
to have cryptlib fall under the GPL).  However there's nothing to stop you from
distributing Jabber under the GPL and cryptlib as is, for all intents and
purposes it'll be the same thing (it's free for pretty much anyone to use).

Peter.