> I would expect hardware designs to be treated more like hardware than > software.
A hardware "design" is not hardware. Only a naive parsing of the words would treat it so. A software design is not treated like software; you are free to write about how ATM machine crypto is designed, even if you can't export ATM machine crypto software without a license (because it's proprietary and not mass-market). A hardware design is a lot like software. It's human written and human readable, it's trivial to reproduce, it's compiled automatically into something that can execute, and if you write it into hardware, then it does something. The court case that EFF won against the export controls was won on those grounds: the government can't suppress the publication of human-written and human-readable text, on the grounds that somebody somewhere might put it into a machine that does things the government doesn't like. Sun may be chicken on the point, and the government did a sneaky trick to technically avoid having a Ninth Circuit precedent set on the topic, but a similar precedent was set by Peter Junger's case in another circuit. I think Sun would be well within its rights to ship VHDL or Verilog source code that implements crypto under an open source license. And I'd be happy to point them at good lawyers who'd be happy to be paid to render a more definitive opinion. John Gilmore --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]