OT: PGP, commercial product vs opensource stuff - viability/usability

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Sun, Oct 30, 2005 at 04:24:00PM -0500, John Esak wrote:
> We are about to *buy* PGP. Reasons... simple, we were told if we gather the
> source and make our own version for either SCO or Windows... we will have
> "limited to no success".

I can't see why it should be that hard to build.

It comes *with* Linux, of course, but I wouldn't be surprised to find
that it was in Skunk.

I suspect it might *not* be in the distro, but the reason isn't
technical.  It's *patent*.  Using it for commercial purposes
requires a license.

See http://www.gamers.org/~tony/pgp-legal.html

as well as http://www.faqs.org/faqs/pgp-faq/part1/ which goes into
stunningly more detail,

and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PGP

and note that GnuPG (Privacy Guard) *may* be interoperable enough for
you (there are version issues intended specifically to make violating
the patent harder, as I understood it).

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
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