Bernd's comments on GPGME

Joel N. Weber II devnull at gnu.org
Tue Jul 29 06:23:02 CEST 2003


One other question that doesn't seem to have been discussed is whether
the number of people who would pay for support contracts etc would
increase if gpgme was more widely usable, thus leading to gnupg
getting wider use.

I personally don't care very much; I found that for the bits of gpg
that are needed to use it with openssh, writing my own parser for
gpg's output didn't end up being all that much trouble, and it also
means that you don't have the requirement of an external library,
which may make it easier for people to be willing to provide
precompiled ssh binaries that support gpg.  (And now I own the
copyright on such a parser, so if I want to go integrating it into
libraries that do TLS, I can.)

I do think that if evolution wants to use gpgme under the lgpl because
of their dual license, that presumably they are making money on their
dual license, and perhaps they ought to pay money for the privilege of
being able to use GPGme.  Or maybe someone should consider maintaining
patches for the GPL'd version of evolution to make it use GPGme.  Part
of the point of GPL'd software is that it's not like the original
author has a monopoly on being the maintainer.  And maybe *that* would
do something useful to promote free software.












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