Re: LYNX-DEV SSLynx

[Greg Stark]

David Woolley <address@hidden> writes:
> Any Lynx containing RSA code would have to be issued under a clause in the
> GPL which permits countries to be excluded

This is the error in your logic. No such constraint would be needed in the
license. And no one need to denied access to the source. As long as the
development happens outside the US and the distribution is done from outside
the US, no restrictions need to be added. 

The Americans who import it can worry about what they're allowed to do. And in
fact it's for them that clause of the GPL may be troublesome. The GPL would
prohibit their trying to distribute a derivative copy within the US that used
RSAREF or that bars export.

In other words, the GPL doesn't prevent a LynxSSL as long as you do it in a
country that allows you to distribute it freely. And it acts to prevent
someone from distributing a divergent branch with additional restrictions.

> Incidentally, I note that you are at MIT, so should have easy access to
> the FSF.  I think there are some important questions about the GPL here,
> and that SSL versions of Lynx are probably being distributed in breach
> of it at the moment.

Oops, maybe i should have mentioned, I'm currently in Canada; read the headers
more carefully :) The best place to discuss this further is
gnu.misc.discuss. In fact I already raised your argument there and no one
seems to agree with you, maybe you can contribute to the discussion there.

Please if anyone wants to continue this discussion move it to gnu.misc.discuss 

The only thing left to discuss here is whether we want to bother finding
non-US ftp sites and whether there are non-US programmers with the time and
initiative to do the SSL integration. None of this is very hard though, if
anyone wanted to write the code they could just post the patches to
ftp.psy.uq.oz.au in the same directory as the Mosaic variant, for example.

For more information look at the SSLeay site: http://www.cryptsoft.com

greg