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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:15:20
Jim McCoy (mccoy@yahoo-inc.com)
Wed, 7 Oct 1998 13:02:30 -0700
Frank O'Dwyer writes:
>Agreed. For example, having SSLeay (say) used in some proprietary
>program or other would achieve very little in the way of "cypherpunk
>goals" (unless perhaps the company voluntarily published improvements
>and bug fixes for SSLeay).
Excuse me? What exactly to you think the "cypherpunk goals" are? It seems
to me that promoting the adoption of strong crypto by everyone is high on
the list and when we say "everyone" we mean to include the vast majority of
users who are using propriatary and closed-source programs. That means that
if a proprietary program uses SSLeay or any other crypto library to give the
program strong crypto then the "cypherpunk goals" are being achienved.
I don't give a damn whether the application is "free" or not, I care whether
or not it provides users with good security and privacy. The relative
freedom of the program (regardless of who is defining the word freedom) is
incidental to the matter. If Microsoft came out with a statement that they
were going to use SSLeay to provide all users (foreign and domestic) with
strong crypto at all levels of the OS I am quite certain that Eric would be
quite happy with this outcome even though no source would be shared and no
improvements or bug fixes would come back from Redmond.
jim
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:15:20