🚀 go-pugleaf

John de Armond defends Miller's claim that Bidzos is threatening
people with prosecution under the Munitions Act. (Whew. That sentence
reads like the plot of a daytime serial. And what about Naomi?)

But Bidzos never threatened anyone with that. In a couple of private
messages discussing the subject (and in my case, prefaced by
"I understand you are interested in PGP") so there was no threat,
he merely mentioned, with quotes from the Act and the history
of how PGP got here, that PGP was a violation. I did not
read that as a threat, veiled or otherwise, but as information.
He never said, "and I'm going to tell the Feds" and being an
adult in full possession of my faculties I know the difference
between Bidzos and the Feds.

As one who has been following this discussion only for the past
month or two, it seems to me that some here have a chip on their
shoulder about RSA/Bidzos entirely unwarranted by any facts.
They do own a perfectly good U.S. patent, and until it's
overthrown, have every right to exploit it for their benefit
and protect it.

Moreover, others have had over 15 years to try to overthrow it,
and have not succeeded. Thus current arguments about it's not
being valid seem to me to be the petulant wailing of children
who have been refused free toys. Those with a strong economic
interest in challenging it (IBM, Apple, etc.) and plenty
of money so to do have not done so successfully but rather,
have licensed it from RSA. That, to me, tells the story,
since such firms have never been reluctant to refuse to pay
royalties when they thought a patent was weak.

Finally, that they are permitting ripem (which, though not
perfect is pretty good) or anything else someone wants to
take the trouble to write from scratch using RSAREF, seems
to me to be clear evidence that they are bending over backwards
to provide a path to free software for non-commercial private use
for those who wish to take the trouble. The RSAREF agreement
permits modifying it, so any lack of features in an RSAREF-based
program is the fault of the developer, not RSA.