🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <2073@ltb.ltb.bso.nl> wierda@ltb.ltb.bso.nl (Gerben Wierda) writes:
   NeXT ships its NeXTSTEP 3.0 software without the FEE software installed,
   probably because of the US government forbidding it.    [...]
   effort to create a package to install PGP in such a way on the NeXT that 

An obvious workaround would be for NeXt to publish the encryption algorithms
used, but not the actual software implementation, since algorithms
don't yet appear to be "munitions", and some outsider could develop a
good implementation.  Alternatively, if they don't want to be that public,
they *might* be able to contract with a non-US firm to implement the algorithm,
but that would take a lot more lawyers to tell you if it's ok.

   Btw. Using PGP in the US is illegal, because of the RSA patent. I don't see a
   way yet to get around that one. But the rest of the world might force a
   standard on this.

Could we convince RSA to take a more relaxed attitude on licensing
their product, in return for a large, low-cost US market?
After all, most of us use MS-DOS on occasion, and it's a licensed product,
but it's cheap and Microsoft's license terms don't place any undue restrictions
on users that keep your lawyers from letting you use it.
Their RSAREF license is way too hairy for me to use casually at work,
and I'm not sure I trust a key distribution system that may have the
government getting involved at the upper layers.  They're also working
to license RSA to big computer companies, but I'd really rather have
the freedom to use a mail system I want and a privacy system I can hack on.

Unfortunately, the US government is *preventing* RSA from selling to a
large, potentially lucrative market, by forbidding exports, which
makes it less attractive for them to do a cheap mass-market product here.