[CentOS] [OT] RedHat's licence, CentOS rebuild

Dag Wieers dag at wieers.com
Sun Aug 20 21:30:10 UTC 2006


On Sun, 20 Aug 2006, Alain Reguera Delgado wrote:

> On 8/20/06, Daniel de Kok <danieldk at pobox.com> wrote:
> > On Sun, 2006-08-20 at 08:33 -0400, Alain Reguera wrote:
> > > maybe you are not in the list I refer as "we". would like to know how
> > > you'll feel if you see your country in the line 67-68 of this file:
> > > http://olpc.download.redhat.com/olpc/rawhide-snapshots/2006-05-27-0237/eula.txt
> >
> > That has nothing to do with Red Hat, but US export regulations.
> > Exporting Fedora/RHEL (or any other US-located Linux distribution that
> > integrates strong encryption) violates US export laws. Many countries
> > have comparable regulations. Refer to the following survey for more
> > information:
> >
> > http://rechten.uvt.nl/koops/cryptolaw/
> 
> then, is not rh/fc laws, but US export regulations. rh/fc respect
> that, so the eula file in fc. right?. and because rh/fc and then
> centos integrate strong encryption (like GPG), US export regulation
> deny access to these distros to those countries listed in the eula.txt
> file. right ?

Incorrect. CentOS does not necessarily get the sources from Red Hat and 
therefor are not bound by the EULA of Red Hat. So if CentOS would download 
the SRPM from Red Hat, extracts the SPEC file, downloads the sources from 
upstream, compares them with Red Hat's and then rebuilds the packages.

The export control section of the EULA does not apply as none of the 
cryptographic stuff comes from Red Hat (or from within the US).

I'm not saying CentOS works that way, but I guess it would be better if 
they did.


> if so, it would happen not just to rh/fc or centos, but with all
> distros built in US that integrate strong encryption. right ? even the
> distros don't integrate an eula.txt file on it (the respect to US
> export regulations, this is enforced by US laws, either way ...
> right?).

If a CentOS developer from the US rebuilds a package on a UK server and 
releases it, does he export something ? I don't think so.

So imagine the CentOS build servers are in the UK, the US export laws do 
not apply.


> Now a question: Is free download consider as exportation ?

Is a free download from Heanet Ireland to a buildserver in the UK bound to 
US export regulations ? I seriously doubt that. IANAL

Kind regards,
--   dag wieers,  dag at wieers.com,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[all I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power]



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