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

Sun Aug 20 12:54:49 UTC 2006
Daniel de Kok <danieldk at pobox.com>

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/

> for a minute, feel like one of "we" and maybe you have the answer that
> is needed. (please, I appreciate your comment, don't confuse mine)

I think that many opensource/free software developers would prefer to
have no export restrictions on cryptography. But we are all bound by
these laws, so there is not much that can be done about this issue
(besides convincing people that cryptography actually helps protecting
citizens).

-- Daniel