Changing GPGME's license

[Werner Koch]

On 18 Jul 2003 10:27:04 -0400, Greg Troxel said:

> impact of GPGME on the greater struggle for proprietary software will
> be small, whereas the impact on the struggle for universally-avaiable
> crypto will be large.

That is what I expect too.

> likely to be not.  Even with GPGME as LGPL, I would not expect large
> companies to adopt it into their products; that gets into the
> obligations of clause 6 to distribute linkable .o's and to refrain
> from prohibiting reverse engineering.

>From my experience over the last years, a lot of companies are using
PGP or OpenPGP for internal and external purposes and often asked for
an OpenPGP library to link against.

Clause 6b allows for shared libraries as an alternative way of
linking. 

> So, an offer to let such places use GPGME in proprietary programs
> (with normal commercial terms, for money), might be a good strategy,
> combining the goals of widespread adoption and recovering some of
> your costs, while leaving the library as GPL or LGPL for others.

The major drawback with that is, that we can't include any other
[L]GPLed software and have to maintain everything for ourself.


Thanks,

   Werner

-- 
Werner Koch                                      <wk@gnupg.org>
The GnuPG Experts                                http://g10code.com
Free Software Foundation Europe	                 http://fsfeurope.org