Re: SNOW-3G / ZUC implementation under FOSS license?

Hi Paul, On Mon, Jul 15, 2019 at 12:58:08PM +0100, Paul Sutton wrote: thanks for your feedback. I personally find all I found so far on the the ETSI "IP policy" quite shady, to be honest. It's weird how the "restricted usage undertaking" and related documents appear to be devoid of any information about what kind of rights or license they are talking about. "intellectual property" is a marketing term. It could refer to anything from trademarks, patents to copyright. It's a bit of a surprise that the industry doesn't appear to have developed more legal clarity around this. This is not only true for those crypto systems, but equally true e.g. of the reference voice codec implementations. The specs requires a bit-exact match to what is released as their source code - yet that source code comes without copyright statement or any indication of license terms. The big question is how realistically one could write an independent implementation which renders the bit-exact results without writing code that looks identical. Also, there's typically always some collections of constants / tables, which you have to copy 1:1. Sure, there's some flexibility in the details of an implementation, but to me it's somewhat questionable how that would look from a copyright point of view. Guess I'll have to have that discussion within the FOSS legal circles I happen to have found my way into. It would be great to have a discussion around all of this with ETSI, but I somehow fear they will not really have anyone on the table with a deep understanding how FOSS works both legally and technically. I'd very much like that idea. If you have capacity to work on that: great! Maybe it's also something where one could convince some FOSS-friendly academics that it would be worth having e.g. some students work on it. I don't really have much day-to-day contacts to academic cryptographers, but I know quite a few and can try to ask around. Regards, Harald -- - Harald Welte <laforge(a)gnumonks.org> http://laforge.gnumonks.org/ ============================================================================ "Privacy in residential applications is a desirable marketing option." (ETSI EN 300 175-7 Ch. A6)