Re: propose: `cypherpunks license' (Re: Wanted: Twofish source code)

["Eric S. Raymond" <esr@snark.thyrsus.com>]

Perry Metzger writes:
>I live in both Richard Stallman's world (the Open Source community)
>and in the Cypherpunk crypto community.
>
>The two have different goals. RMS is mistaken about appropriate
>licensing for crypto code written by cypherpunks because he thinks the
>goals are the same, when they are not.
>
>The Open Source community seeks maximum spread of free software.
>The Cypherpunk community seeks maximum spread of the use of non-GAKed
>cryptography.

With respect, Perry, I think you may actually have confused *three*
different agendas.  RMS's advocacy of the GPL should not be taken to 
represent the entire open-source community, and GPL is not the only
license conforming to the Open Source Definition.  

The open-source community as a whole shares many of RMS's goals, but
much of it differs with RMS, in a way very relevant to this
conversation, on the question of tactics.  There's serious question as
to whether the spread of open-source software is best served by a
"viral" license like GPL, or by licenses like BSD's which allow the
code to be used without disclosure conditions by commercial
developers.  The Open Source Definition embraces both kinds of
license.  That is very much by design.

Clearly, the "non-viral" licenses such as the BSD or MIT licenses
exactly serve the purposes of developers such as EAY who would like
the impediments to reuse of their code to be as low as possible.

Accordingly, I urge you not to encourage an artificial split between 
the cypherpunks and the open-source community.  Your licensing argument
is not with the open-source community as a whole, it is very
specifically with the partisans of the GPL.

I think I may safely assert that the wider open-source community
regards the cypherpunks valuable as allies in the struggle for freedom
and openness, and would not press you to sacrifice your objective of
spreading non-GAKed cryptography in order to conform to a licensing
doctrine that we, ourselves, do not unanimously agree with.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr">Eric S. Raymond</a>

The following is a Python RSA implementation. According to the US Government
posting these four lines makes me an international arms trafficker!  Join me
in civil disobedience; add these lines of code to your .sig block to help get
this stupid and unconstitutional law changed.
============================================================================
from sys import*;from string import*;a=argv;[s,p,q]=filter(lambda x:x[:1]!=
'-',a);d='-d'in a;e,n=atol(p,16),atol(q,16);l=(len(q)+1)/2;o,inb=l-d,l-1+d
while s:s=stdin.read(inb);s and map(stdout.write,map(lambda i,b=pow(reduce(
lambda x,y:(x<<8L)+y,map(ord,s)),e,n):chr(b>>8*i&255),range(o-1,-1,-1)))

Every Communist must grasp the truth, 'Political power grows out of
the barrel of a gun.'
        -- Mao Tse-tung, 1938, inadvertently endorsing the Second Amendment.