Jon says:
At 03:41 PM 3/30/98 -0300, Paulo Barreto wrote:
1. Though my implementation is indeed public domain, the very algorithm is
*not*, as Dr. Yuliang Zheng clearly states in his HAVAL page. However,
he's very liberal in conceding "licenses" (in fact, absolutely no fee is
due; Dr. Zheng only wants to keep track of where HAVAL is being used).
I'm a little concerned about this. It is my understanding of copyright law
that one can copyright an *implementation* but not an algorithm. I wrote
Yes, that's my understanding as well. People have been getting away
with patenting algorithms and other mathematics (pretending they're
process patents and using appropriately convoluted language in the
patent to further that fiction), but copyright covers only the
expression and not the factual content.
Does anyone have an opinion? Should I strike HAVAL? Should I leave it there
even if it's just a placeholder for later? It's certainly nice to have
extra hash algorithms, but it is by no means something we should delay
over. It can always go in 1.1.
I'd like to keep it, but not at the cost of substantial delays. Perhaps
another iteration or two, having somebody assign an OID while discussing
it with Prof. Zheng, would be enough to resolve it. And if it isn't
resolved by Last Call, it's OAPL.
Another possibility is Tiger (Anderson & Biham,
http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/~biham). I don't see an OID for it either,
though, nor do I see anything about IPR for it. Its design is different
from MD5 and SHA-1 (which are in the same general family), which is a plus.
Perhaps it's premature to include either HAVAL or Tiger in the spec, though,
since neither has gotten a fraction of the attention of MD5 and SHA-1.
Jim Gillogly