Re: [ox-en] Open Source and Denied Parties
- From: Thomas Uwe Gruettmueller <sloyment gmx.net>
- Date: Sun, 7 Sep 2003 16:25:11 +0200
Hi auskadi,
On friday 2003-09-05 13:37, auskadi wrote:
I just went to check out some buggy thing in my inability to
open some attachments in my Mozilla mail that get sent to me
from a mac ... I started here:
http://www.mozilla.org/releases/#1.4
And I saw this with a nice bold yellow background:
* This source code is subject to the U.S. Export
Administration Regulations and other U.S. law, and may
not be exported or re-exported to certain countries
(currently Afghanistan (Taliban controlled areas), Cuba,
Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria) or to
persons or entities prohibited from receiving U.S.
exports (including Denied Parties, entities on the Bureau
of Export Administration Entity List, and Specially
Designated Nationals).
...
Some guy/genius here seems to think that the U.S. Export
Administration Regulations is not a GNU/Open Source issue.
...
But back to the point: Anyone got any thoughts or resources
about this new form of "Open Source"?????
The best place to discuss legal aspects of free software is the
Debian Legal mailing list. IIRC, they have discussed this issue,
and the result was something like this:
The yellow box is not part of Mozilla's license, but just a
warning for US citizens not to infringe their export laws. The
Mozilla developers do not have any influence on US laws, so US
citizens would not be allowed to export Mozilla to Iraq, with or
without the yellow box. For people outside the USA however, this
warning is void. So, there is a legal way to export Mozilla to
Iraq.
However, if the content of the box would have been included in
the license, the restriction would not only apply to US citizens
but to citizens of all states that have a copyright law. This is
the case for some pieces of software (but not Mozilla), and
both, Debian and the FSF regard them non-free.
cu,
Thomas }:o{#
-- - http://www.bildungsbande.de/~sloyment/ - --
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