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Date: Sat, 20 Apr 2013 00:37:30 +0400
From: Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com>
To: john-dev@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: licensing

On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 09:42:28PM +0200, magnum wrote:
> On 19 Apr, 2013, at 2:47 , Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com> wrote:
> > john-1.7.9-jumbo-7-licensing-stats.txt
> > john-1.7.9-jumbo-7-licensing.txt
> 
> > magnum, I think these two text files are reasonable to be committed into
> > the tree, under doc/ - what do you think?
> 
> Maybe I never replied to this? They are committed.

Yeah, you did not reply earlier.  Thanks!

I think the files committed under these names should be kept as-is, and
we may add a new work-in-progress file called LICENSING and using
similar format.  We'll need to start it with a disclaimer that it's
work-in-progress and does not fully reflect the current state of the
source tree (nor the state at any particular moment in time), since the
rest of the tree keeps changing.  Hopefully, after a while we'll have
fewer licensing discrepancies between the source files, and the
LICENSING file won't be that scary to look at.

And yes, I also hate to spend time on this, but I also hated not being
able to answer the question of "what source files from jumbo may I be
able to reuse in a non-GPL'ed project or product" (and its variations),
which is sometimes asked (off-list).  A text file like this provides
reasonable answers to such questions, and the variations are "encoded"
in form of different things to grep for.

As you can see, I also identified some issues with our own distribution
of jumbo, and with redistribution e.g. by Linux distros.  Last time I
checked, Debian only included a very small subset of jumbo components in
their "john" package (it was weird: neither official JtR, nor jumbo),
because they were uncertain of licensing terms for the rest.  Hopefully,
a text file like this will help them include much more of jumbo, if they
want to, and eventually all of it (once we fix the identified issues).
(I'd rather see them provide the official JtR as well, separately, but
that's another matter.)

Alexander

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