Hi! Here is some combination of the Chinese Dissident and Fred the Lawyer tests.
Consider the following situation. There is a program written in Europe. Someone in USA (say, Fred the USA dissident:-) takes this program and incorporates some form of encryption which is illegal to export from USA. Should this be possible with free software? Probably yes. But what if original program's licence includes a forced publication requirement? Even if the licence requires to provide modifications only to original author, on demand, at cost etc. Fred is stuck. GPLv2 is OK with this: Fred may distribute the changed program only to his friends inside the USA and give sources with binaries. But there seems to be problem if Fred gives Joe a written offer for sources and Joe transfers it to a third party outside the USA (BTW this third party doesn't even need to have binaries to request sources). And IIUC there are also restrictions on import of software to the USA (DeCSS?), right? So a symmetric scenario is also possible. And things become more complicated in ASP case -- restrictions on import/export of services and software are likely to differ, so it could be legal to put some program behind a web interface but be illegal to put the program itself on the web. Sorry if all this is trivial, already known, irrelevant or completely incorrect:-) WBR, Sasha P.S. BTW what does "TINLA" mean?
