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On 9/20/2021 14:15, Robin H. Johnson wrote: |
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> On Mon, Sep 20, 2021 at 01:27:37PM -0400, Rich Freeman wrote: |
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>> On Mon, Sep 20, 2021 at 12:46 PM Alec Warner <antarus@g.o> wrote: |
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>>> |
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>>> Could we add some text to the license concepts covering patents? It |
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>>> seems to have been omitted? |
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>>> Is my understanding of how we manage patented software correct? |
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>> |
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>> I think you have the gist of it. Is there actually anything in the |
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>> repo these days which is patent-encumbered? I realize this is a |
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>> little tangential, but I think this is probably why we don't have a |
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>> well-thought policy: it just doesn't come up much. |
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> Elliptic Curve cryptography is the most topical & impactful thing I'm |
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> aware of. |
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> |
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> RedHat have for many years stripped parts of it out of their OpenSSL & |
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> libgcrypt packages, and continue to do it with OpenSSL-3 [1] (I note |
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> that somebody has dropped these patches from Gentoo's openssl as of v3 |
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> and I intend to restore them). |
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> |
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> RedHat's legal team clearly know something there that they aren't |
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> disclosing the details of publicly, because the patches said the patents |
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> expire in 2020, but when I asked off-list if EC could be re-enabled |
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> based on the expiry dates in the files, they claimed that patent issues |
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> were still present, without giving any detail. |
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> |
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> Somebody else ALSO asked about the Brainpool EC curves specifically and |
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> similarly got nowhere [2]. |
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> |
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> [1] https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/openssl/c/347681c6b246d9b6a08c73bb40e5eefaf8596d71?branch=rawhide |
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> [2] https://www.spinics.net/linux/fedora/fedora-legal/msg03673.html |
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> |
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|
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[snip] |
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|
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Is there any advice on how this impacts net-misc/dropbear? That has ECC |
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(both ECDSA and Ed25519) support, and I use it for SGI/MIPS netboot images. |
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The build doesn't have any bindist uses in it, and ECC support is a |
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localoptions.h compile-time option (enabled by default). ECC is much faster |
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on old SGI hardware and generating the hostkeys at bootup takes just a |
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second or two, whereas RSA can take up to 10-15 seconds. So I'd like to be |
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able to use ECC on these platforms and distribute netboot images using them. |
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|
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-- |
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Joshua Kinard |
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Gentoo/MIPS |
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kumba@g.o |
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rsa6144/5C63F4E3F5C6C943 2015-04-27 |
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177C 1972 1FB8 F254 BAD0 3E72 5C63 F4E3 F5C6 C943 |
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|
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"The past tempts us, the present confuses us, the future frightens us. And |
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our lives slip away, moment by moment, lost in that vast, terrible in-between." |
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|
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--Emperor Turhan, Centauri Republic |