OpenPGP Card

'Lionel Elie Mamane' lionel at mamane.lu
Tue Sep 6 18:57:01 CEST 2005


On Tue, Sep 06, 2005 at 04:52:55PM +0200, Zeljko Vrba wrote:
> 'Lionel Elie Mamane' wrote:

>>Please do so. I'm curious how you will handle:
>>
>> 1) Pointers being passed
>>
>>    By copying the whole address space back and forth at each call and
>>    return? "Morally" that's not running in separate address spaces!

> Make the programs share their _data_ segments, but NOT their _code_
> segments. GPL is about _code_, not about the _data_ created and used by
> the code.

The pointer may point to code. It can be a pointer to a function. For
a callback, for example.

> I don't have all details worked-out, but none of them seem really
> unsurmountable. In the extreme case, nothing that couldn't be solved
> with little kernel-side work and support.

>> By all means, please follow through on this plan. It will be very fun
>> to watch!

> In what way "fun"? :)

1) Scientifically, see interesting problems tackled.

2) From a slightly more "Schadenfreude" perspective, watch the legal
   discussions and / or flamewars it will create. White papers flying
   around! Eben Moglen saying your mechanism doesn't circumvent the
   GPL, you disagreeing and arguing back, a new GPL revision coming
   out to address the "loophole" you have demonstrated (if it gets
   settled that it _is_ a loophole), etc. You saying that the revised
   GPL version doesn't count, because not derivative work and thus
   legally cannot enforce limitations.

   Fun to watch from the sidelines, cheering on, etc ;-)

> In any case, Werner will run out of his only reasonable argument
> (IMHO) for not supporting PKCS#11 and users will (hopefully) profit
> ;)

I find the following argument very reasonable: I have no interest in
implementing PKCS#11 and nobody has stepped up to pay me to do it.

He won't run out of *this* argument ;-)

-- 
Lionel



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