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?)

---
|             Terrorists - The Boogiemen for a new Millennium.           |
|"The moral PGP Diffie taught Zimmermann unites all| Disclaimer:         |
| mankind free in one-key-steganography-privacy!"  | Ignore the man      |
|                                                  | behind the keyboard.|
|         http://www.ctrl-alt-del.com/~alan/       |alan at ctrl-alt-del.com|





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