Re: [PATCH] use gcrypt instead of libssl for hash

On Sun, 17 Apr 2005, Junichi Uekawa wrote:

Well, libgcrypt seems to be pretty rare out there - I certainly don't have it installed on my machine.

It does? I really don't read it that way. 

The openssl license is BSD+mention, but it only kicks in if you _redistribute_ it (and you're not allowed to market things as being openssl based without giving them credit, but that's another thing).

So yes, the openssl license is incompatible with the GPL in the sense that you cannot actually _mix_ the openssl source-code with the GPL source-code. But that's true of a lot of libraries, the normal system C library being just one common example.

The GPL makes explicit mention of the system libraries (which openssl definitely is by now), so it's ok by the GPL . And I don't see how you'd claim that the openssl license doesn't allow it. So it all looks ok by me.

That said, if somebody wants to abstract this out, and have a simple "sign with sha1" interface that can be used with both openssl and libgcrypt (or any other crypt license), then hey, go wild. Or merge the SHA1 code from the kernel, even, and make the project entirely self-sufficient.

But requiring libgcrypt seems silly. Especially as the libgcrypt interfaces are horribly ugly, much more so than the openssl ones - so even if you use libgcrypt, you don't actually want to use it directly, you want to have much nicer wrappers around it.

		Linus