Re: mutt no longer in non-us?
On Nov 15, Brian Ristuccia wrote:
> I just recently noticed that mutt is no longer in non-us.
>
> What has changed that allows us to distribute mutt from the US to people
> outside of the US despite the fact that mutt is capable of integrating with
> strong encryption software and thereby capable of performing strong
> encryption on messages it sends?
A better understanding of the law by the Debian maintainer, I suspect.
> Also, if mutt really belongs in main, what prevents OpenSSH from being moved
> to contrib instead of non-us/non-free? Just like mutt, openssh contains no
> encryption software, but relies on an external library (libssl09) to do its
> encryption.
mutt isn't linked against a crypto library; openssh is. Also,
openssh's sole purpose is to provide encrypted connections; mutt
normally doesn't do anything with encryption unless you install
another package (PGP or GnuPG) and tell it to use it. To put it
another way: mutt works without crypto available; openssh doesn't.
> And finally as a hypothetical, if a person were to create a modified version
> of TiK or GAIM that used pgp or gnupg to optionally encrypt messages, would
> this have to go in non-us?
IANAL, but I think the answer is no. If it required the user to
encrypt messages, and thus required the use of crypto, I think the
situation would be different.
Chris
P.S. Obligitory NSA flag (and why the hell is Ortega in it?):
SCUD missile Ortega AK-47 Uzi $400 million in gold bullion Rule Psix
Nazi militia Project Monarch counter-intelligence JFK cypherpunk Kibo
Ron Brown clones
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