Re: [MiNT] Sparemint announcement

[Guido Flohr <gufl0000@stud.uni-sb.de>]

On Sat, Sep 04, 1999 at 04:05:03AM +0300, Teemu Hukkanen wrote:
> > P.S.: One note, especially for U. S. users:  Sparemint possibly
> > violates export restrictions in some countries of the world.  This
> > is not intentional but on the other hand we just don't care. ;-)
> > However, although all Sparemin software is free, it may be 
> > illegal to redistribute, export or even use some packages in
> > your country.  One example is currently mutt.
>                  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> 
> This is actually false, mutt itself doesn't contain cryptographic code,
> only crypto-hooks. Mutt development used to be in two branches, mutt and
> mutt-i (the latter being the international version, with crypto-hooks),
> but it's integrated now, as crypto-hooks themselves aren't illegal to
> export.

100 % agreement.  But why does Michael Elkins then make such a big
deal of it?  I never understood why it should be illegal to 
distribute a program that could call another program which 
has possibly export restrictions.

Anyway, he is the author and it is his decision to maintain a
US- and non-US-version of mutt.  But I live in Germany and I
didn't see a reason why I should also build to distinct versions
of Mutt.  But for mirrors I wanted to be on the safe side.

Besides, I rather thought of packages like PGP, the portlib
(crypt!), cracklib and so on.  These packages are not yet
ready and so I took mutt as an example.

Ciao

Guido
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