At 05:29 PM 23/07/97 -0700, you wrote:
$25K upfront is prohibitively expensive for freeware and for garage-shop programmers. It's a drop in the bucket for a large project such as Netscape that wants to add some security, but in a 3-person-month email widget it's excessive.
On the other hand, it's now possible to license RSAREF for a much more reasonable fee from Concentric; I think it's just per-copy rather than a big up-front hit.
As of March, 1997 Consensus Development (www.consensus.com) stopped licensing RSAREF for a very reasonable amount (~$200 US + 2-3% range I think it was??) Consensus' "SSL Plus" toolkit requires licensee to also license BSAFE from RSADSI. Maybe too many people were using commerical RSAREF licenses rather than the BSAFE toolkit. -M