On Sun, Nov 15, 1998 at 08:04:37PM +0000, James Troup wrote: > > It CAN be put into main, > > No it *can't*. master, ftp.debian.org and other US mirrors are > mirrored all over the world. If we put crypto software into main, we > will be responsible for several mirrors unwittingly violating US > export laws. However lame we think the laws may be, deliberately > inducing other people to unknowingly break the law is not something we > should *ever* contemplate doing. > > [There's also the matter of CDs] And what to we do when all free software is banned? You might laugh now, but the US is trying to pass legislation to make anything that could possibly be used to infringe copyrights illegal. Like the CDA, this cannot be enforced really against anything but can be applied to most any target and used as a stranglehold. Any wager that free debugging tools are the first targets? Followed by free development tools, and then free servers I suspect. Will we systematically consider things "no longer suitable for main" as this kind of strongarm tactic is applied? The US and other governments will push as much as they can. I'm disgusted that so many people here have said that GPG and other things like it FAIL THE DFSG because of the US's stupid laws. And I live here. It's long past time to stop trying to please a single government. If we can't have stuff on US servers then we can't, so be it. But by keeping these things out of the circle as to what is Debian, we are discriminating against free software globally to please one stupid little country run by a bunch of corrupt self-important people who aren't honest enough to make it as used car salespeople. Debian is not a US project, it's a GLOBAL project. We can do the best we can to accomidate our US mirrors, but in the end we really should not be limiting ourselves to restrictions imposed by a single police state. -- Show me the code or get out of my way.
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