Re: Report from DSA Team Sprint in Oslo
Tshepang Lekhonkhobe <tshepang@gmail.com> writes:
> I'm curious why ftp-master needs to be hosted in the US.
> (please CC me)
Historically, the US has obnoxious export control restrictions which, due
to a lawsuit by Dan Bernstein, were forced into being partially waived for
open source software on free speech grounds. But only partially waived;
it was still necessary to notify the US government of every export of open
source software from the US that may contain crypto code. Thankfully,
though, the way in which that notification had to be done was suitable for
automation.
ftp-master was therefore located in the US because we took advantage of
the NEW chokepoint to submit the required automated notification to the US
government of a new piece of software that was being "exported." That
way, US Debian Developers could ignore the whole export control issue
because they were uploading it to a host still in the US and the project
handled the notification automatically on their behalf when the packages
went to our world-wide mirrors.
I think some of this has since gotten simpler and I heard some rumors that
the US was giving up on even the notification requirement for export of
open source software, but I haven't been following the details closely.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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