From: "Frank O'Dwyer" <fod@brd.ie>
Date: Tue, 15 Dec 1998 02:53:23 +0800
To: "Arnold G. Reinhold" <reinhold@world.std.com>
Subject: Re: Text of Wassenaar regulations, with comments
In-Reply-To: <v03130300b296975290f2@[24.128.119.92]>
Message-ID: <3675520A.B9A4350@brd.ie>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



"Arnold G. Reinhold" wrote:
> I am not a lawyer and different administrations could issue more
> restrictive rules (as the US does), but the new Wassenaar regulations
> themselves do not seem to affect free distribution of programs like PGP and
> Linux as long as they qualify as "public domain" as Wassenaar defines it.

Unfortunately, AFAIK copyrighted software is NOT public domain. GPL and
the like usually make a big song and dance to the effect of "this s/w is
copyrighted and not in the public domain". Even worse, I think the
original PGP is pretty clearly not in the public domain, since
commercial uses must be paid for. So does anyone know just how does
Wassenaar define the term "public domain", and is open source indeed
covered? 

Cheers,
Frank.