gnupg, openssh post RSA patent/US encryption export laws
[I'm not currently subscribed to this list, so please cc me on responses.]
After about September 20, the RSA patent has expired in the USA.
Also, earlier this year, the USA finally relaxed its export laws
concerning encryption software. (There are still some places where
you can't export encryption, but it's not nearly as bad as it once
was.)
With this change, there have been a number of positive developments in
the open-source world. For example, gnupg 1.0.3 now supports RSA.
Also, RedHat 7.0 includes stunnel, openssl, openssh, apache's mod_ssl,
an ssl-aware smbclient, and perhaps other software that uses the RSA
algorithm, and since 6.2, Kerberos, gnupg, and the 128-bit version of
Netscape have been included.
As far as I can tell, Debian has not moved any of these things out of
non-free/non-US even for the unstable distribution. Are there plans
to do this? If not, why not? I'd be grateful if someone could shed
some light on this issue.
For what it's worth, I'm brand new to Debian (just trying it this
weekend for the first time) but I've been using Linux since 1992 and
UNIX in general since 1987, so I apologize if this has been discussed
already.... I did search the October archives of this list before
posting...
Thanks
--
E. Jay Berkenbilt (ejb@ql.org) | http://www.ql.org/q/
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