Re: Problem serving one-click installer to Syria

On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 6:57 AM, Magnus Hagander <magnus(at)hagander(dot)net> wrote:

>> The situation is ridiculous I know - it's easy to get OpenSSL from any
>> number of places of course. As of this morning, we have people looking
>> into the legal issues to see if there is a way that we (EnterpriseDB
>> and the community) can make all our downloads available universally
>> without putting anyone at risk of prosecution. We're also talking to
>> other large organisations involved in Open Source to see if/how they
>> deal with this within the projects they work on.
>
> AFAIK, open source *communities* don't generally do anything at all
> about this. We can restrict access to any of our servers that run in
> the US, but as long as there are mirrors and the licence is open,
> anybody outside the US can just redistribute it. So it sounds like th
> easy fix is to just mirror it onto the community mirror network.

+1

I'm going to ping Eben Moglen (lawyer at the software freedom law
center) about this on our behalf. The few people I've talked to who
have had to deal with similar issues think that crypto built from open
standards no longer are subject to prosecution, and whether the
software originated in the US or not, we are free to redistribute.

-selena

--
http://chesnok.com/daily - me