PostgreSQL, OpenSSL, and the GPL

Posted Feb 16, 2011 20:07 UTC (Wed) by foom (subscriber, #14868)
In reply to: PostgreSQL, OpenSSL, and the GPL by madscientist
Parent article: PostgreSQL, OpenSSL, and the GPL

It has one significant disadvantage though: almost nothing uses it. :)

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PostgreSQL, OpenSSL, and the GPL

Posted Feb 16, 2011 20:39 UTC (Wed) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link] (2 responses)

Well, compared to OpenSSL that might be true but I wouldn't say "almost nothing": all the Mozilla apps obviously use it (Firefox, thunderbird, etc.) Additionally (according to wikipedia) it's used by Chrome, Evolution, Pidgin, OpenOffice, various Red Hat services and various Sun Java services.

Numerically maybe not so impressive but there are some pretty high-profile users there.

The main point, though, is not how many applications use it but the fact that it's (a) correctly backward compatible, and (b) guaranteed to be available on all LSB systems. LSB has a bad rep but it IS a useful baseline that's very nice to rely on, for what it contains, and virtually every serious Linux distro supports it now.

PostgreSQL, OpenSSL, and the GPL

Posted Feb 17, 2011 2:11 UTC (Thu) by jamesh (guest, #1159) [Link] (1 responses)

Furthermore, those applications probably account for the majority of SSL connections established on most people's machines, and the largest number of different servers connected to. So the actual networking code is probably just as robust as OpenSSL.

The main issue is whether the API it provides makes it as easy to integrate into applications as the OpenSSL API does.

PostgreSQL, OpenSSL, and the GPL

Posted Feb 17, 2011 15:54 UTC (Thu) by lkundrak (subscriber, #43452) [Link]

Well, there is nss_compat_ossl library which implements a subset of openssl API on top of NSS. For most software it takes very little effort to carry them over from openssl, just to be on the safe side.