If the military makes changes to OOo and the binaries of those changes stay 
in-house, then they are not violating the GPL if the code stays in-house as 
well.  The violation would only occur if they distributed the binaries, which 
in your scenario of a raised security classification wouldn't happen.  They 
would not distribute the binaries or the source.  So, all is still well as 
far as I can tell.

On Thursday 10 October 2002 12:18 pm, Alastair Scott wrote:
> On Thu, 10 Oct 2002 17:08:06 +0000 Miark <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 
wrote:
> > shane <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> saith:
> > > ...the last asset, money, is startiong to get tied up between courts,
> > > payed off poloticians, dropping economy, and great ventures like the
> > > xbox...
> >
> > Excellent commentary on M$, Shane. About the _only_ thing you left out
> > was this beautiful dash of salt: the latest cancer OS by Mandrake has
> > spread to said xbox ;-)
>
> Well ... I work on a military project which is specifying a combination of
> off-the-shelf and bespoke software.
>
> I was handed a paper today which studied in great detail (50 pages) the
> security of Microsoft Office. It was damning and stated it _could never_ be
> secured and that an alternative was _mandatory_ if anything other than
> unclassified information were to be on the same PC.
>
> The suggested alternative was OOo and the clincher was the availability of
> the source code; if insecure it could be secured. (This adds an interesting
> wrinkle to the GPL; if these security fixes increase the security
> classification of the software the updated source code cannot be
> redistributed!)
>
> So the fortress has already fallen but nobody can hear it fall ;)
>
> Alastair


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