Daniel Stenberg wrote:
> Did anyone of you face this issue with (lib)curl and if so, how did
you sort it out? Or even if you didn't, do you have any
> particular ideas and/or advice I should respond to people asking about
this?

Politics slang is "scrambled" to me, but I can note this is about using
curl/libcurl within arms (or things considered as such): I totally
disagree with such a use, but the curl/libcurl license does not ban it.

The first part of the answer to your question is related to
ethics/ideology... and we are not prepared and used to discuss such a
topic on this list :-)

There are probably as many opinions as people reading/writing to this
list. You probably need a neutral advice from someone who can understand
the underlyings of politics slang and, AFAIK, they are not many among
us.

I remember an item seen on the web (probably on slashdot) some years
ago, talking about some software released under a new opensource licence
forbidding to use the product in a project being harmful to human people
(sorry, I tried to find a reference, without success): although the goal
of this license paragraph was "pure and sane" (targetting military use,
arms, etc), the discussion degenerated to a troll, some arguing that
surgical equipments cannot use this software because they are doing
"human injuries" to cure, some that this restriction would left the
place to other project, some that you'll never know whether used in an
arm or not, etc. I do not think the current list is a good place for
such a troll.

Please also note that the french customs department firstly classified
the SYSTER TV decoder as "war hardware", because although harmless, it
contained cryptographic algorithms! Special authorizations were then
needed for exportations :-(

In any case and whatever community consulting action you take (if some),
the final decision belong to you since you are the captain of this
project...

The second part of the answer is of pratical matter. Depending on your
decision for the ethics part, you should probably consider aspects of
arm-making users on one side, and curl/libcurl strategy one the other.
Whether having such a number

_ eases or hardens arm-maker's life (either people, companies or
countries)

_ is a benefit or an inconvenient for curl/libcurl strategy and "market"
penetration (i.e.: long-term plan for curl/libcurl)

_ is good or bad for YOU.

Sorry for being so fuzzy, but the answer to your question would
definitely never be of Boolean type :-) Nevertheless I hope the above
paragraphs are useful to you.

Regards,
Patrick
Received on 2008-03-14