On Nov 15, Brian Ristuccia wrote: > I just recently noticed that mutt is no longer in non-us. > > What has changed that allows us to distribute mutt from the US to people > outside of the US despite the fact that mutt is capable of integrating with > strong encryption software and thereby capable of performing strong > encryption on messages it sends?
A better understanding of the law by the Debian maintainer, I suspect. > Also, if mutt really belongs in main, what prevents OpenSSH from being moved > to contrib instead of non-us/non-free? Just like mutt, openssh contains no > encryption software, but relies on an external library (libssl09) to do its > encryption. mutt isn't linked against a crypto library; openssh is. Also, openssh's sole purpose is to provide encrypted connections; mutt normally doesn't do anything with encryption unless you install another package (PGP or GnuPG) and tell it to use it. To put it another way: mutt works without crypto available; openssh doesn't. > And finally as a hypothetical, if a person were to create a modified version > of TiK or GAIM that used pgp or gnupg to optionally encrypt messages, would > this have to go in non-us? IANAL, but I think the answer is no. If it required the user to encrypt messages, and thus required the use of crypto, I think the situation would be different. Chris P.S. Obligitory NSA flag (and why the hell is Ortega in it?): SCUD missile Ortega AK-47 Uzi $400 million in gold bullion Rule Psix Nazi militia Project Monarch counter-intelligence JFK cypherpunk Kibo Ron Brown clones -- ============================================================================= | Chris Lawrence | Visit my home page! | | <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | http://www.lordsutch.com/chris/ | | | | | Grad Student, Pol. Sci. | Join the party that opposed the CDA | | University of Mississippi | http://www.lp.org/ | =============================================================================
