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Comment by FredFS456 | Hacker News Reader

Jason also sent an email to the WireGuard mailing list addressing this. [1] In the email, he stated that Cloudflare repeated refused to work directly with him and his team as part of the upstream project.

[1] https://lists.zx2c4.com/pipermail/wireguard/2019-March/00404...

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One of CloudFlare's goals is to have a BSD-Licensed result. Seems reasonable to maintain isolation from the core WireGuard team that is publishing under GPL to support that goal, just to ensure they don't accidentally end up with GPL code in their codebase.

That is a reasonable explanation, if that's the case it would be great if CloudFlare just came out and said that instead of being vague about it.

With the exception of the kernel-specific code, we're actually pushing more and more of our stuff as MIT/Apache2 licensed. If there's a project we haven't done that to yet that's not permissively licensed, just email team at wireguard dot com or ask on the mailing list. wireguard-go, for example, is MIT.

It seems that the official rust implementation wireguard-rs[1] is currently GPL licensed.

[1]: https://github.com/WireGuard/wireguard-rs

It's interesting that this seems to mirror our experience with Cloudflare's Rust implementation of QUIC:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19019150

Let's see how it continues, so far it looks like compatibility was an important goal of the Cloudflare team.

Yes, that's unfortunate and I think he's handled it well there. It was the same with the guy who did a windows implementation, didn't want to work with the upstream so is rife for fragmenting the protocol long-term

I don't get what's unfortunate about it. Cloudflare is probably being upfront about their implementation suiting their needs; I think it's laudable and avoids bad blood in the future, should the goals diverge.

Given that WireGuard has been designed to be relatively simple, maybe multiple widely used implementations will make sure it stays that way.

Because they've refused to engage with the upstream, it puts them in the 'driving seat' as it were as their available resource eclipses the community's.

The official upstream windows implementation is making excellent progress however. In specific, WinTUN[1] was just released.

Disclaimer: My employer sponsored a lot of the work with Jason for the windows wireguard port. (Search for "Accelerating Windows Development on https://www.wireguard.com/donations/)

[1] https://lists.zx2c4.com/pipermail/wireguard/2019-March/00403...

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