[108349] in Cypherpunks
Re: RSAREF / RSAEuro Legal Issues
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Peter Gutmann)
Sat Feb 13 10:24:25 1999
From: pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz (Peter Gutmann)
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
X-Charge-To: pgut001
Date: Sun, 14 Feb 1999 04:05:28 (NZDT)
Reply-To: pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz (Peter Gutmann)
Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com> writes:
>RSAEURO claims to have been written from scratch, not using any of RSA's
>code. If this is true, then there's no copyright problem, and you can use it
>instead of the RSAREF it claims to be plug-compatible with, which makes it
>convenient for providing non-commercial versions for US users. I've heard a
>rumor that alleges that parts of RSAEURO may be translations of RSAREF rather
>than clean rewrites; you'll have to examine the code for yourself if this
>bothers you.
RSAEURO isn't a translation of RSAREF, it *is* RSAREF with the copyright
notices changed (or at least the last version I looked at was), and a few
trivial alterations to the code (as someone else who looked at it a while back
put it, "It's not just call-compatible, it's source-code compatible"). The
RSAEURO author (using the term "author" loosely) hasn't stolen just RSADSI
code, he's also taken code from other authors (including myself, compare the
RSAEURO SHA code with the code I posted to sci.crypt in 1992 or 1993) and
altered it to look like he wrote it.
Peter.
