Public domain source in wine

[Mike McCormack]

Michael Jung wrote:

> I would like to use source code from LibTomCrypt (http://libtomcrypt.org) in 
> my implementation of rsaenh.dll (which I still hope has a remote chance of 
> being accepted into wine ;-), in order to get rid of the OpenSSL 
> dependencies.

Sounds good.  I wonder if you can then build rsabase on top of it, if 
that's even necessary...?

> LibTomCrypt is in the public domain. I have two questions:
> 
> 1. What is the legaly correct way to do this? As I understand it, public 
> domain source can simply be taken as is and re-licensed under the LGPL. Is 
> this correct? Am I allowed to remove the headers in the original file, which 
> state that the code is public domain? How do you generally acknowledge the 
> original author?

I think the way is to leave the original headers on there, and add the 
LGPL header above it, perhaps with a note saying something like:

/* This file was derived from code written by Tom St. Denis which the 
following license: */

> 2. A more technical question: LibTomCrypt's original sources are highly 
> customizable (A lot of conditional compilation and hook-functions). Since we 
> have fairly special requirements for rsaenh, I could cut down the source code 
> a lot. However, this would make it harder to incorporate code from a newer 
> version of libtomcrypt, once it becomes available. Which way is preferable? 
> Having less code or beeing easily upgradeable?

My aproach when incorporating code from other libraries has been to 
modify as little as possible, but remove all the #ifdefs and code that 
isn't relevant to the WIN32 platform.

It's likely that the code will diverge from libtomcrypt over time 
anyway, and there maybe be win32 "features" that we wish to implement... 
NSAKEY anybody? ;)

Mike