On Sat, Aug 27, 2016 at 6:16 PM Igor Gnatenko <ignatenko@redhat.com> wrote:
Hi,

I have some questions about OCB[0] and it's usage in Fedora.

I wanted to package pycryptodome[1] and found that they implement OCB
in their code. From my POV (completely without any legal knowledge) it
seems that it's not completely free[2] as it's not allowed for
military use. It seems to be allowed without any restrictions only for
OpenSSL.

What do you think? Looks like now we have mosh[3] packaged and it
includes OCB (so if it's not acceptable, it most probably should be
removed).


[0] http://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/ocb/
[1] https://pycryptodome.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
[2] http://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/ocb/license.htm
[3] https://mosh.org
--
-Igor Gnatenko


I'm not a lawyer, but it seems to me that OCB is available to be implemented under 4 different license options:
1. Any open source software licensed under an approved license by OSI or public domain.
2. General license for non-military use.
3. OpenSSL-specific use.
4. Special license from the patent owner.

Only option 2 has the non-military restriction, and anything in Fedora would almost certainly fall under 1 or 3. So, I can't imagine there'd be a problem using the OCB patent in Fedora software. I'm actually not even sure why option 3 even exists, since it seems to be a subset of option 1. Regardless, it doesn't look like the non-military restriction of option 2 would apply if option 1 is used.