Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 2 Aug 2000 19:18:42 -0400 (EDT) | From | Henry Spencer <> | Subject | Re: FW: Crypto |
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>> FreeSWAN is complicated by the fact they want no US resident contributing. >> That makes life kind of tricky >Yes. I'm not sure if this is a healthy idea anymore, at least not with >the last BXA concessions...
Trouble is, those concessions are not Supreme Court decisions. They could be reversed with one stroke of a bureaucrat's pen. (Remember that it's an election year in the US.) It has happened -- four years ago, US rules on exporting satellite technology were reasonable, but not any more, not since Congress decided they could embarrass the President over it.
If FreeS/WAN were to once start accepting US contributions, then making its code base *verifiably*, *unquestionably* free of them again -- should that become necessary -- would be extremely difficult. It's an all but irrevocable step, requiring considerable trust in a government that has historically been openly hostile to free crypto.
Henry Spencer henry@spsystems.net
(I don't normally have time to follow this list much, but a friend pointed me to this discussion...)
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