On Fri, Apr 23, 2004 at 01:43:30PM +0300, Stas Pirogov wrote: > > However the license agreement for NetrekXPMod source > is kinda inherited by the source code writers from COW > to NetrekXP Mod, so the source code copyright is pretty same for > all coders that touched it (at least for all that are > mentioned in copyright.txt in distribution). Not true. The original source code license does not require future contributions to have the same license. It's a legal mess, but again, irrelevant from a practical perspective. > And of course we are talking about distribution of > code without RSA key, because as far as I know > nobody will giveup his RSA key. This is another gray area. All the source code to generate a binary distribution is there (you can create your own RSA key), but the true original source code for a generated binary is not fully available since the key is not distributed. This is another reason why Netrek source code cannot released under a GPL even if we had the authority to. > Now, could you expand a little bit about permission > you received from US Bureau of Industry and Security ? > I'm actually interested in history and I beleive most > of developers would like to hear about that. If you search google's archive of rec.games.netrek for RES-RSA posts made by me and others, some old articles should show up that explains the situation. The brief summary is this: Prior to 2000, the US Bureau of Export Administration (BXA) classified high grade encryption software as a munition, which meant that such software basically could not be exported outside of the US under most circumstances. Furthermore, RSA Labs owned exclusive patent rights to the RSA encryption algorithm in the US at that time. Fortunately, RSA Labs allowed for royalty-free use of RSA for certain non-commercial use provided that such permission was requested and granted. Ray Jones (and possibly others) originally secured that permission from RSA Labs, and when I took over RES-RSA I reacquired permission from RSA Labs again since I substantially rewrote the code. Because of the BXA regulations, however, RES-RSA could not be distributed outside of the US. So there was a European implementation of RES-RSA that was distributed exclusively outside of the US, and the code was kept in sync. I heard that the Euro version of RES-RSA was based on an illegal export of an early version of US RES-RSA, but that may or may not be factual. In 1/2000, BXA changed the regulations to allow unrestricted exports of cryptographic software under their "open source" exception clause. When this happened, I registered RES-RSA and all netrek software that uses RES-RSA with BXA to qualify for this exception. Only software distributed under netrek.org and sourceforge.net qualify for this exception; any mirrors or copies hosted at other locations may or may not qualify (but they should as long as they are exact copies). Later in 2000, RSA Lab's patent on RSA expired. This was irrelevant for Netrek since we had acquired permission to use RSA inside the US and the patent was not valid outside of the US. Sometime in the last few years, BXA got renamed to Bureau of Industry and Security. Dave _______________________________________________ vanilla-devel mailing list vanilla-devel at us.netrek.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/vanilla-devel