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Date: Mon, 1 Oct 2012 21:29:28 +0200
From: magnum <john.magnum@...hmail.com>
To: john-dev@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: GPL license is not free at all

On 1 Oct, 2012, at 18:08 , Aleksey Cherepanov <aleksey.4erepanov@...il.com> wrote:

>>> It means that you could not add any additional limitation of freedom.
>>> Adding unrar with its limitation violates this.
>>> 
>>> Does it make sense for you?
>> Who knew freedom had so many restrictions!!
> 
> These GPL's restrictions are needed to protect freedom of every user.

But I am a user and I get nothing but a serious *limitation* of freedom here. I modified and included a piece of freely distributable code (it is!) into our project of freely distributable code, and suddenly they are allegedly sinful to combine so we must now drop RAR from JtR, in the name of Freedom? Sounds like extremism to me.

But this is of course pointless argumentation and I am grateful you are trying to get this straight.

> It is a pity that a lot work were done on top of non-free unrar. I am
> sorry for not bringing this whole question earlier.
> 
> We like magnum and respect his efforts. And it would be a big pity to
> drop his work. That is why Alexander Cherepanov proposed a plan how to
> keep this work legal till format based on fully free unrar
> implementation would be ready
> (http://openwall.com/lists/john-dev/2012/09/29/20 ). Does it look good
> for you?

Thanks. The problem with Unarchiver - and all other code I have found except ClamAV's - is that they are written in object-oriented languages. Even if I wanted to, I simply can't use them.

I'll await what Solar has to say when he gets the time (yet I wish he could spend his time on more constructive things than this). I still have hard to believe source-only distribution can possibly be a problem. By the way, ClamAV still have the RAR code in their git three years after the mentioned mailing list thread, while binary distributions like Debian and Fedora just omit the RAR stuff in their binary packages of ClamAV. So I'm hoping I can get away with just "#ifdef TAINTED" or something like that.

magnum

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