Re: GPL and OpenSSL in libs3
Hey all. I am the original author of the libs3 library being discussed in
this thread. I was unaware of this discussion until just now when I did a
google search on 'libs3' just out of curiousity.
Thanks very much for having this informative discussion about libs3 and its
use of openssl/GnuTLS, and the resulting licensing issues.
In fact I have just released version 0.6 of libs3, which I believe
circumvents the licensing concerns by doing what was suggested in this
thread: it removes libs3's direct use of cryptography functions provided by
the openssl library (or GnuTLS/libgcrypt), instead implementing its own code
for HMAC-SHA-1 and base64 encoding. These were the only functions that I
was using directly from those libraries, and removing those references
allows my library to have no direct dependency on openssl. However, any
application linking with my library does still need to link with libcurl,
and that will typically require linking against either openssl or GnuTLS (or
another TLS library), but that is an issue for any application linking
against libcurl to sort out. The point being, that libs3 no longer forces
any usage of openssl from applications linking against libs3 itself. And
thus, I believe that the openssl licensing terms are no longer an issue for
libs3. I did leave the clause in the libs3 license giving special
permission for linking against openssl, should anyone want to link libs3 +
libcurl + openssl into their application.
Ideally, anyone using libs3 would also use a libcurl + GnuTLS + libgcrypt
combo anyway, but I found this combination to not work so well on Windows.
I was unable to find a precompiled Windows libcurl + GnuTLS binary, so had
to build my own, and the result linked properly with my 's3' test program,
but any attempt to actually issue a request generated an "Internal Error"
from libcurl. I did not spend very much time trying to figure out why this
was so; I had already run well beyond the time I had scheduled for getting
libs3 + libcurl + GnuTLS to work on Windows, so I just gave up.
Thanks again for your discussion of this issue, and best wishes.
Bryan
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