From: Rich Salz <rsalz@nntp.com>
Date: Sat, 16 Sep 95 13:09:22 PDT
To: remailer-operators@c2.org
Subject: RE: Commercial Mixmaster
Message-ID: <199509162008.QAA06266@nntp.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


>The concern is not "commercialization", per se, but rather the use
>of "commercialization" as an excuse to build in "proprietary"
>features (Back doors?) for which no corresponding source code is
>involved.
>
>Since no one has made a good case for there even being a COMMERCIAL
>market for Mixmaster, could there be other motives?  ...
>
>No, I'm not accusing Lance.  But if he no longer has the time to
>support Mixmaster, then perhaps some other crypto-friendly group
>should take over the task and keep it an OPEN system, with source
>code available.  In fact, even freezing Mixmaster as is would be
>preferable to "improvements" that people don't/can't trust.

This doesn't make sense.

Someone wants to commercialize Mixmaster.  You don't know who it is,
but you since you can't see how to make money doing this, you suspect
their motives.  Yet on the other hand, you think they will be so
successful that enough people will buy binary-only servers such that
backdoors are a real threat, perhaps by forcing people to upgrade
or otherwise breaking interoperability with the current free-source
remailer network.

You can't have it both ways.

But even if you could, there's a solution. :)  Download the source
and start releasing "blender", a free-source anonymous remail system
that is upwardly compatibly, *and based on* the current Mixmaster.
	/r$
s