Re: Interest in packaging GNU Shishi and GNU Generic Security Service?

[Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com>]

Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu> writes:

>>> other), the addition of licensing problems means that there's basically no
>>> motivation for anyone to try to use shishi.
>>
>> One motivation would be to get the unique features that Shishi has that
>> the other Kerberos implementation has.  E.g., non-ASCII support,
>> X.509/OpenPGP authentication through GnuTLS.
>
> Maybe.  My experience, having run a large Kerberos realm for over a decade
> now and having fought with countless applications to get Kerberos support,
> is that this really isn't on anyone's radar.  It's hard enough just to get
> them to look at Kerberos in the first place.

Sure.  And re-licensing to LGPL is certainly a possibility.

However, when I re-licensed GNU SASL from GPL to LGPL, after similar
requests, it didn't bring me any benefits.  People who said they would
use and contribute to the project if it was LGPL never showed up after
the license changed.  Further, all application that use GNU SASL today
appear to be licensed under GPL anyway.  The license change meant a
lot of work, separating the core package from the library, and it
didn't pay off.  I have considered reverting back to GPL, so that GNU
SASL can use some libraries that are licensed under GPL (such as
libksba, a X.509 library).  So forgive me if I'm skeptic when people
who aren't using my software come to me and claim that it would be
better for me if I changed my license.  So far, those claims doesn't
appear to have been valid for me.

> Anyway, I'm still interested.  I'm really busy at the moment and have some
> other things that I have to finish before I can reasonably start a new
> project, but it does sound like the packaging effort would be fairly
> simple and I'd like to have shishi around to play with.

Yes, I think an initial Shishi package should be simple to create.  It
doesn't have to create a working KDC installation on-the-fly, like
'make install' does.

Thanks,
Simon