IP: more on two on New Encryption Regulations

[farber () cis upenn edu <farber () cis upenn edu>]

----Original Message-----
From:           Brett Glass <brett () lariat org>
To:             farber () cis upenn edu; <ip-sub-1 () majordomo pobox com>
Cc:             shapj () us ibm com
Subject:        Re: IP: more on two  on New Encryption Regulations
Date:           Thursday, January 13, 2000 12:55 PM

At 05:19 AM 1/13/2000 , Jonathan Shapiro wrote:

> I took part in some of the review process for the new regs, and I think
> Brett is mistaken. Code licensed under GPL does not require payment of a
> licensing fee or royalty

The GPL doesn't require you to pay a licensing fee or royalty if you give
your own work away. However, if you wish to use the GPLed code to 
make a COMMERCIAL product, you must pay royalties or licensing fees. The
language of the regulation says that if a royalty is required to use the
code in "any" commercial product, it is not freely exportable.

Maybe this was not an anticipated consequence, but this is what the
current language of the regulation says.

In fact, this may be a very good thing. If encryption code is published
under a license that allows commercial reuse, it will be incorporated into
commercial products as well as free ones, and closed source products as
well as open source ones. This will promote standardization, as did
UC Berkeley's release of the BSD TCP/IP stack. (The fact that the BSD
TCP/IP stack was released for commercial as well as non-commercial use
is often said to be responsible for the ubiquity of the Internet today.)

The GPL, by contrast, promotes fragmentation and incompatibility by 
preventing commercial developers from using the same code base as those 
who are publishing open source.

So, ironically, export rules which require exported open source code to 
be usable in "any" commercial product may be the absolute best thing we 
can do to promote the widespread use of strong cryptography.

--Brett