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

[Fairlight]

On Sun, Oct 30, 2005 at 04:46:00PM -0500, Jay Ashworth may or may not have
proven themselves an utter git by pronouncing:
> 
> 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.

Not true, to the best of my knowledge.  The IDEA algorithm is still
patented, but so long as you don't use that algorithm, you should be fine.
The RSA algorithm was released to the public unencumbered about a week
before the patent was to officially expire (many of us were underwhelmed
with their transparent attempt at "generosity" to curry goodwill).  There
are a bunch of other algorithms in there though.

GPG itself is simply covered by the GPL, which makes it just as usable as
Apache.  Forget all the other URL's you gave--go right to the source:

http://www.gnupg.org/(en)/documentation/faqs.html

You can use it freely for commercial use so long as you abide by the GPL.

As for SCO 6 and GPG, it's already there.  I highly doubt the system owner
ever installed it intentionally. it's either with the latest Skunk, or it
came with SCO 6.  I just looked at a SCO 6 system, and here's the result of
`gpg --version`:

gpg (GnuPG) 1.4.0
Copyright (C) 2004 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This program comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it
under certain conditions. See the file COPYING for details.

Home: ~/.gnupg
Supported algorithms:
Pubkey: RSA, RSA-E, RSA-S, ELG-E, DSA
Cipher: 3DES, CAST5, BLOWFISH, AES, AES192, AES256, TWOFISH
Hash: MD5, SHA1, RIPEMD160, SHA256, SHA384, SHA512
Compression: Uncompressed, ZIP, ZLIB, BZIP2

That's only 2 patchlevel revisions behind current (1.4.2).  Note that
they didn't include IDEA--that's the patent, probably.  That's not
uncommon, having that one omitted--for a lot of software, not just GPG.  I
think a lot of OpenSSL distros omit IDEA as well.

I've helped people use GPG automatedly with their software before.  Piece
of cake.

It -should- work just fine.  I'd save the money, personally.

mark->
-- 
There is no "I" in TEAM.
This would be the primary reason I've chosen not to join one.