On Wed, Sep 27, 2006 at 12:08:31AM +0200, Carlo Luciano Bianco wrote: > Il /25 set 2006/, *John Clizbe* ha scritto: > > > There were a couple messages last year on the [cryptography] > > mailing list wrt ECC and patents: > > Thank you very much for the links, they are very interesting! > > > Actually the ECC code in OpenSSL was supplied by Sun and is > > patented by Sun. Sun contributed the code in 2002, but it was not > > made part of OpenSSL until 2005, as part of OpenSSL 0.9.8. On the > > patented code, Sun says: > > > > Q7: What about the patented technology in the contributed code? > > > > Sun acknowledges that it has some patented ECC technology in > > the contributed code. > > > > Sun grants to OpenSSL users the right to make use of the > > contributed patented technology in the context of OpenSSL. > > Well... Does this mean that we can link GnuPG to OpenSSL library for > ECC subroutines and stay safe from patent problems? If so, this can > be a temporary solution (of course, if OpenSSL license is compatible > with GnuPG one)...
No, the licenses are not compatible. We had quite a problem (and are still fixing the fallout) with even a small license exception to allow linking the LDAP and CURL keyserver helpers to OpenSSL for ldaps and https. Plus there are the patent issues, which raise a very large headache for Free software in general. In any event, it doesn't matter even if the licenses were compatible: OpenPGP does not have ECC in it. GnuPG won't support ECC until the OpenPGP standard specifies it. I don't see that happening any time soon, especially given the patent issues. David _______________________________________________ Gnupg-users mailing list Gnupg-users@gnupg.org http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users
