Follow @Openwall on Twitter for new release announcements and other news
[<prev] [next>] [<thread-prev] [thread-next>] [day] [month] [year] [list]
Date: Wed, 03 Oct 2012 01:31:21 +0400
From: Alexander Cherepanov <cherepan@...me.ru>
To: john-dev@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: GPL license is not free at all

On 2012-10-01 23:50, Milen Rangelov wrote:
> By the way, Debian distribute unrar in both binary and source form, under
> "non-free". It also has 7z package which is able to unpack rar using unrar
> code is _not_ under the non-free section.

rar support for 7z is in a separate package called p7zip-rar. It *is* in
non-free section.

Note however that all talks about non-free unrar concern only RAR3.
Unpacking support for RAR2 is available under GPL --
http://unrarlib.org/ & http://home.gna.org/unrar/ . I didn't brought it
up before because I doubt RAR2 support in john is very interesting but I
could be wrong. Anyway keep it in mind while checking 7z in Debian etc.

> Moreover, I'm afraid that if we were to follow strictly 

We have no choice.

> that GPL madness,
> we should stop developing GPU code at all, because we link to the
> proprietary OpenCL library anyway.

There seems to be two main approaches to this. First one is to say that
a program wrote against an open standard, not a particular library.
Second one is to invoke a special exception in GPL available for such cases:

| However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need not
| include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or
| binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on)
| of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that
| component itself accompanies the executable.

It's not completely clear how reliable these approaches but I don't know
about OpenCL enough to judge it myself. Anyway I hope OpenCL library is
not included in john bundles -- that would be a problem.

Switching to a free toolchain would also be a good thing. Isn't LLVM
support for OpenCL (say, https://bitbucket.org/gnarf/axtor/ ) already
sufficient for this?

-- 
Alexander Cherepanov

Powered by blists - more mailing lists

Confused about mailing lists and their use? Read about mailing lists on Wikipedia and check out these guidelines on proper formatting of your messages.