Mozilla, License (again), PPG, GPGME

[Werner Koch]

On Sat, 09 Mar 2002 18:38:15 +0100, Ben Bucksch said:

> That Mozilla relicensing was intended for Mozilla being *used* in GPL
> apps like Galeon or Evolution, not for having GPL code included in

This turned out to be a very good decision; Galeon is a pretty useful
browser for websites which won't show up nicely using Lynx or w3m ;-)

> Believe me, I created Beonex Communicator, and I really try to keep
> everything completely Open-Source. But users want a browser that
> works, with Flash and all the other goodies, *now*. They don't want to

If users wants that they should go and get this stuff from elsewhere
but don't expect that the GNU project trades Freedom for convenience
of so-called "must-haves".  

Most sites are pretty useless for any security aware users because
they are not usable without JavaScript. 

> Please don't make these goals incompatible. As I said, I choose a
> slightly less compatible Open-Source implementation over the

PGP and compatible with OpenPGP?  They don't even support signing
subkeys which is really weird as OpenPGP is (too) closely based on the
protocol used by PGP >=5.

> include in the browser? Surely, PGP would be desireable. Do you think
> that the Abgeordneten would accept not to be able to see Flash content?

I hope they can stay away from this stuff.  Such kind of easy to
trojan software can lead to a lot of work restoring valuable
documents.  Well, if the office of the chancellor had used such a
software, we might had an opportunity to know the content of all the
files Mr. Kohl's officers had to purge from their servers after the
lost election in 98 ;-)

> And last but not least, your lib probably has 0 chance to be part of
> the base Mozilla, if it is not MPL/GPL/LGPL tripple-licensed. Any such
> plugin would surely live a third-party life, left bitrotting after a
> few months of frequent Mozilla changes.

I don't care.

> As much as I'd like to, I cannot change the content that is out there
> on the web.

I you have something important to say or write, you should do it in a
standard format.  If not, well it can't be that important or there is
no need to attract more customers.

> Being locked out of a few major sites makes users already consider to
> switch the browser. You guess which one that is.

I am not on a crusade to ban a specific proprietary browser.

> I haven't looked at all at it, because its author basically says that
> it's just a little toy that he dumped on an ftp server, not really
> ready for use.

A friend checked it out under Windows and according to him
it basically works and he could exchange encrypted or signed mails
with Mutt and Gnus users.  

We will see whether someone starts to work on it.

> Have you audited it security-wise? I don't know enough about the
> problems there (exec() etc.) to do that.

I have not looked at it.

  Werner