Comment by acqq | Hacker News Reader

Comment by acqq | Hacker News Reader

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GnuPG was never made to solve the problems of the authors of commercial software. It's made for GNU (Gnu is Not Unix) systems, in match with all ideological goals of GNU.

I earn for living producing a closed source code, I do use the GNU software in my day-to-day work but I know I can't use GNU libraries in my projects.

Complaining that GnuPG is not made to be convenient for the BSD-like library uses reflects OP's serious misunderstandings of the basic premises of GNU and BSD.

Not to mention that the author posits that his selection of "what's enough" for his use case would be enough for other use cases. I claim that he doesn't actually need an OpenPGP support as long he says that the small subset would be enough for him. He just needs some library to solve encryption and decryption in his limited scenario. He should use some other (BSD-like licensed) crypto-library and develop on it. But somehow I suspect even if somebody would then implement what's enough for him, the result wouldn't be open-source. You know, BSD licenses don't force you to do so.

Moreover I belive that OP misunderstood which part of software does what, I've never heard that GPG ever did "split a message into packets."

Yeah all that closed source software like firefox and thunderbird.

Your argument has nothing to do with the actual problem in the article, that running a command line application when you need a library is troublesome and restrictive.

Hell, if it was a library its license would matter far more than it does as a non-library.

OP wants a library which can be linked in the iOS apps. It's not a GPL compatible use, so even if there were a GnuPG library with more functionality, it wouldn't fit his use case.

His use case would be covered by a BSD-like licensed library, which is not compatible with GPL goals, so he picked the fully wrong target to complain about. It seems that this important distinction is not clear to the OP and to you.

Thunderbird, mentioned by you, actually uses GnuPG without problem. The very reason it can use it is because it uses it as a command line utility. If there were a library, GNU licensed, Thunderbird wouldn't be allowed to use it because of the license incompatibility.

The apple store is only GPL-incompatible on a technicality, though. It doesn't have any meaningful restrictions on your rights.

Isn't Thunderbird's license MPL 2.0, which is GPL-compatible?

Howdy, I'm OP! Neat to see an old blog post on HN.

1) GPL/LGPL are not incompatible with iOS, they are incompatible with the App Store. I don't care about that. I was writing a GPL'd app, and I would be pleased with a GPL'd library. iOS was also not my only target. (response to one of your other posts)

2) The idea of 'what's enough' was for e-mail decryption only. Which is what I wanted to do. And I wrote an open-source OpenPGP library to do it: https://github.com/mrmekon/libsimplepgp

3) I don't need 'some library to solve encryption and decryption', I need 'some library to solve decryption of PGP-encrypted emails.' A partial implementation of OpenPGP, as a library. Other crypto packages don't support the OpenPGP packet format.

4) Read section 4, "Packet Syntax", the entire concept behind the OpenPGP format: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2440.txt

Wow, it's really nice that you did make a library that solves exactly the problem you've had. IMHO you are really a very specific case, producing GPL iOS code which certainly can't go in the App store.

Updating your blog post with the link to your library would make the post much more relevant, weren't you able to do so?

I understood you "message splitting" like the plaintext or the ciphertext being split, which as far as I know neither is. RFC does use "packets" packets to denote segments as the "packet" with the key and the "packet" with the cypertext but I don't consider recognizing where which begins in order to process it is "splitting." I see now what you wanted to say.

Re "other crypto packages don't support the OpenPGP packet format" -- I understood that libgcrypt also doesn't, so wouldn't be more in the spirit of your goal (if it is) to have OpenPGP more widely used to base libsimplepgp on some BSD, Apache or similarly licensed crypto libarary?

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