After reading Joey's latest DWN, I'm concerned about the possibility of the merging of the non-us portion of Debian in to the main distribution. I haven't tracked this list in the past so I wasn't aware of the discussion until now. In early December I attended a BoF session at the LISA sysadmin conference regarding crypto tools in free operating systems. The host of the BoF was John Gilmore, founder of the FreeS/WAN project. When the topic of relaxed crypto regulations came up, he provided some interesting insight into the FreeS/WAN response. Basically, they're not convinced that export regulations are going to remain relaxed for very long. One thing he mentioned was that the US government has a weird history of changing laws temporarily to avoid losing a long-term precedent-setting court case. Another issue is the philosophical changes taking place with the installation of a new executive branch of the government. FreeS/WAN is still not accepting contributions from U.S. citizens as a result of this. Sure, it may be paranoid, but a little paranoia is warranted when it comes to crypto technologies. I'm going to contact Mr. Gilmore and ask for his thoughts on the current proposal. He might be able to provide us some new insights in to this issue. I'll pass along what he has to say. BTW, for those here who haven't met me on debian-user yet: Hi, I'm Noah, soon to be a Debian developer. I'm really looking forward to contributing to the project! noah -- _______________________________________________________ | Web: http://web.morgul.net/~frodo/ | PGP Public Key: http://web.morgul.net/~frodo/mail.html
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