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Date: Mon, 01 Oct 2012 05:01:58 +0400
From: Alexander Cherepanov <cherepan@...me.ru>
To: john-dev@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: GPL license is not free at all

On 2012-09-30 02:43, magnum wrote:
> On 29 Sep, 2012, at 22:43 , Alexander Cherepanov <cherepan@...me.ru> wrote:
> 
>> On 2012-09-29 16:47, magnum wrote:
>>> This is a list of files containing any reference to GPL:
> ...
>> There are more files:
>>
>> $ git grep -l gpl
>> opencl/cryptsha256_kernel_AMD.cl
>> opencl/cryptsha256_kernel_DEFAULT.cl
>> opencl/cryptsha256_kernel_NVIDIA.cl
>> opencl/cryptsha512_kernel_AMD.cl
>> opencl/cryptsha512_kernel_DEFAULT.cl
>> opencl/cryptsha512_kernel_NVIDIA.cl
>> opencl/msha_kernel.cl
>> opencl/sha1_kernel.cl
>> opencl/sha512-ng_kernel.cl
>> opencl/sha512-ng_kernel_LOCAL.cl
>> opencl/ssha_kernel.cl
>> opencl_cryptsha256.h
>> opencl_cryptsha256_fmt.c
>> opencl_cryptsha512.h
>> opencl_cryptsha512_fmt.c
>> opencl_device_info.h
>> opencl_mysqlsha1_fmt.c
>> opencl_nsldaps_fmt.c
>> opencl_rawsha1_fmt.c
>> opencl_rawsha512-ng.h
>> opencl_rawsha512-ng_fmt.c
> 
> Oh man, all these are our own files. Why did the authors opt to use GPL? Was it on purpose? 

You know, GPL is a quite^W^Wthe most popular Free Software license so
it's not suprising to see it here. Heck, john is under GPL itself so
it's quite natural to license contributions to it in the same way.

Not everybody is well informed about Solar's preferred license terms for
contributions. And even if one is informed about them this doesn't mean
that he/she would like their asymmetric nature.

> Maybe I miss the whole point of GPL but to me it seems to do more harm than good. Extremism is not freedom. We are an open source project, yet GPL right now just sucks our energy.

No, it's not GPL sucking our energy, it's non-free unrar. *If* we are an
open source project then there is no place for this unrar in our project
no matter which license other files are under.

To clear any misunderstandings: the source for unrar is available but
unrar is neither Open Source as defined in The Open Source Definition:

  http://opensource.org/docs/osd

no Free Software as defined in The Free Software Definition:

  http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

or in The Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG):

  http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines

because its license restricts some kinds of modifications. Whether these
particular restrictions bother anybody or not is not that important. And
projects like Debian and Red Hat will not include unrar in their (main)
distributions -- the link was in the very first mail by Alexey.

-- 
Alexander Cherepanov

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