On Mon, 21 Jan 2002 20:50:22 +0000, Adam Back said: > GPG on the other hand is simply wilfully damaging interoperability by > putting their anti-patent stance over the benefit of PGP users. I > know there are modules to add IDEA support but they're not shipped by
The reason to write GnuPG were the patent problems with RSA (at that time) and IDEA. The GNU project is about Free Software and IDEA does not allow the use of the software in a lot of countries. It is not sufficient that Ascom grants (on request) gratis licenses for private use (there scope of private use is actual very narrow, as you are not allowed to use the same box for any business purposes and even charitable organisations have to pay per-user fees), the GPL does not distinguish between private and commercial use. See section 7 of the GPL for the reason why we can't distribute an IDEA implementation. Noone but Ascom and the patent laws are disallowing the use of the IDEA module - we are just not able to distribute it along with GPLed software and guess why we have this loadable module feature in GnuPG. If you want to use IDEA (instead of using a CAST5 enabled PGP 2.6) write to Ascom and ask them to grant a royality-free and perpetual license to use the IDEA algorithm with GPLed software. Or even better help to abolish all patents on algorithms and software: http://www.no-epatents.org or http://petition.eurolinux.org > It seems that the result of GPG and PGP intentionally induced > incompabilities has greatly reduced PGP use. I used to use PGP a lot, This may be true for you and the small set of long term users. In general the use of PGP (well in the form of the IETF OpenPGP protocol) has grown far beyond a small group of geeks. There is at least one major car vendor who demands the use of PGP enrcypted mail from all suppliers. If you look at the keyring anylyses at dtype.org you will notice that there is a large user base. keyserver admins should be able to give some numbers to prove that PGP is actually in use. > However it should be possible to automatically select that option > based on the public key parameters of the person you're sending to, Yes, this is indeed possible and GnuPG does it for a long time. Because encryption interoperability with 2.6 is hampered by the IDEA patent problem it did not made too much sense for me to put a lot of effort into fixing some litlle annoyances related to the inability of PGP 2 to encrypt in streaming mode. Well, I believe David fixed most of this while adding the --pgp2 option. Ciao, Werner -- Werner Koch Omnis enim res, quae dando non deficit, dum habetur g10 Code GmbH et non datur, nondum habetur, quomodo habenda est. Privacy Solutions -- Augustinus --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
