CDR: Re: RC4 - To license or not?
Alan Olsen
alan at clueserver.org
Sun Oct 8 13:32:06 PDT 2000
At 09:27 AM 10/8/00 -0700, Greg Broiles wrote:
>On Sun, Oct 08, 2000 at 03:12:20AM +0200, Stefan Arentz wrote:
> > Real-To: Stefan Arentz <stefan.arentz at soze.com>
> >
> > Applied Crypto says this about RC4.
> >
> > So what's the deal with RC4? It's no longer a trade secret,
> > so presumably anyone can use it. However, RSA DSI will almost
> > certainly sue anyone who uses unlicensed RC4 in a commercial
> > product. THey probably won't win, but they will certainly make it
> > cheaper make it cheaper for a company to license than fight.
> >
> > This was in '96. I do not want to buy a complete BSAFE license.
> > It is too expensive and I only need RC4.
> >
> > Anyone experienced with this? Will they sue?
>
>No, they almost certainly won't. Over the past few years they've moved away
>from their former pugilistic stance and their marketing/sales strategy seems
>to focus more on code quality and diversity of platform support rather than
>fear.
Redhat 7 Deluxe contains an offer for a "free" BSafe SDK for
Linux. (Redhat 7 contains a number of crypto tools, including OpenSSL,
Kerberos 5 (real, not the damaged version MS ships), OpenSSH, GnuPG, and a
bunch of other stuff. A good sign, if they did not ship with a beta version
of GCC.)
As for RSA marketing... i think they have some serious personal issues they
need to seek counselling for. (What is it with the psycho-chick in their
ads anyways? Ex-girlfriend? A stab at Dourthy Denning? Some latent BSDi
fetish?)
---
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| http://www.ctrl-alt-del.com/~alan/ |alan at ctrl-alt-del.com|
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