hello,

On Fri, Aug 19, 2005 at 02:08:09PM +0200, Daniel Stenberg wrote:
>
> I'm a bit disturbed by the recent discussions in the Debian devel camp, where
> they seriously are propagating for throwing out the libcurl version powered by
> OpenSSL to replace it with the one powered by GnuTLS. Yes, not adding one -
> they mean replacing it.

i'm still looking for a solution that makes everybody happy. so even if i said
the long term solution is gnutls do not take it too seriously by now.

> The main reason for this seems to be the old GPL bigotry since OpenSSL is
> under an Original BSD style license while GnuTLS is LGPL licensed. (See
> http://curl.haxx.se/legal/licmix.html for these license details.)

sadly license matters as well as the software it covers. people at debian
want to be able to seriously count on the distributed software there,
so license glitches are seen as very bad things. and i completely
agree with this POV.

> I'm mentioning this here primarily to inform you developers of tools and
> applications that rely on libcurl, that you might be up for some surprises
> soon in Debian land.

but not too soon, if any :)

> I've tried to point out that there are multiple reasons why removing the
> OpenSSL-based package is bad [*], but I have no cred in their camp and my
> options don't count.

i understand your reasons and will not drop openssl support only for "bigotry".

this is the second battle in the field of licensing to which i'm staring
at. the first one was about Reiser4 (poor Hans). well... debian is not
very kind and soft about licenses, but tell me who is. licensing is war.

> I feel a bit sad that my work on getting GnuTLS supported now is about to
> backlash in my face.

this has been a good step, it only needs to be perfectioned.

> These guys talk about fixing the problems if there are any. Yeah right, I
> sooooo believe they are gonna step up and do that. No, I think it is a safe
> bet that this is gonna get back on us. *We* are gonna get questioned and
> bothered when things no longer work like they used to.

this was exactly the kind of work i was thinking to do: bug forwarding :)

i was pretty sure you would have been interested in gnutls feedback. if
you don't want it you should drop gnutls support now, shouldn't you?

> I'm not at all questioning Domenico Andreoli (Debian curl maintainer) on this
> or anything. I firmly believe he does an outstanding work as the Debian curl
> package probably is the best maintained curl package of all Linux
> distributions. This seems more like what other Debian developers and
> maintainers think and impose.

nobody can impose me anything as long as i don't infringe debian
constitution. and since debian is always proud to be about choice (and
i believe it really is) we can safely work to a nice solution that will
make libcurl even more popular. there are lot of people interested in
license glitches to be removed, not only debian.

> This issue isn't decided yet or anything, and even it will be decided to go
> like this I can't but to assume that the decision will be reverted in the
> future if the problems are too big.

at the moment both libcurl3 and libcurl3-gnutls packages are provided.
unfortunately they conflict each other and soon i'll receive lots of bug
reports about people not being able to install their favourite software
because only one flavour of curl can be installed at a time.

this is the right time to make this story find the right direction and
not fold on us. you have all my collaboration.

best regards
domenico

-----[ Domenico Andreoli, aka cavok
 --[ http://people.debian.org/~cavok/gpgkey.asc
   ---[ 3A0F 2F80 F79C 678A 8936 4FEE 0677 9033 A20E BC50
Received on 2005-08-20