On Mon, Jan 29, 2001 at 06:21:00PM -0500, Jeffry Smith wrote:
> Stephen Zander said:
> >
> > Please cc me, I'm not on debian-legal...
> >
> > >>>>> "Jeffry" == Jeffry Smith <smith@missioncriticallinux.com> writes:
> > Jeffry> Nope, non-free (discriminates against non-americans). If
> > Jeffry> I read this right, unless someone can show prior written
> > Jeffry> approval from the US Government to distribute this, Debian
> > Jeffry> couldn't put it on ANY server, period, since non-US folks
> > Jeffry> have access to them. Why do they place laws into the
> > Jeffry> licenses? Anyone bound by the law is bound by the law,
> > Jeffry> regardless of the contract, anyone not bound by it by law,
> > Jeffry> now is bound by it by contract.
> >
> > The clause you're reffering to is standard ITAR/BXA legalese required
> > due to the US gov'ts fear of it's own people. If the code is already
> > outside the US, then Debain can put it in non-US.
> >
>
> Yes it's legalese but two things:
> 1. If you're governed by the law, you have to abide, contract or no contract. No need for it in the license. It is NOT required (AFIAK) in the license, because it is (or was) law.
> 2. The laws are changing. This isn't. So, do we have US Government permission to distribute? Note that this is not code developed outside the US, but code developed inside the US, and subject to export at some point.
> (this point is why you should never include law inside the license - now someone has to go back to the original developers and ask them to change the license to conform to the current law. If they'd done it right to begin with, with a simple NOTE (not in the license, but a separate README) that people were responsible for following the law in their area, no problem would be resulting.
I think it's exceedingly unreasonable to declare software as non-free
since the license specifies compliance with the law at that time (this
was written 5 years ago). I think this clause is clearly meant to
instruct people on the law relating to export from the US. And since
Debian has no intention of exporting this from the US (that's what
pandora is for), I don't think this should matter.
sam th
sam@uchicago.edu
http://www.abisource.com/~sam/
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