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1.2 Features

GNU SASL might have a couple of advantages over other libraries doing a similar job.

It's Free Software
Anybody can use, modify, and redistribute it under the terms of the GNU General Public License. The library can even be distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License.
It's thread-safe
No global variables are used and multiple library handles and session handles may be used in parallel.
It's internationalized
It handles non-ASCII username and passwords and user visible strings used in the library (error messages) can be translated into the users' language.
It's portable
It should work on all Unix like operating systems, including Windows. The library itself should be portable to any C89 system, not even POSIX is required.

Note that the library do not implement any policy to decide whether a certain user is “authenticated” or “authorized” or not. Rather, it uses a callback into the application to answer these questions.