Mixmaster Licensing Offer Explained

[loki@obscura.com (Lance Cottrell)]

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From: Lance Cottrell <loki@obscura.com>
Date: 17 September 1995
Subject: Mixmaster Licensing Offer Explained

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Several rumors have surfaced following my announcement of Mixmaster's
changing status. I want to nip these worries in the bud. After discussion
with the party interested in commercially licensing Mixmaster we have
decided to explain the whole situation publicly.

The company offering to license Mixmaster is Phoenix DataNet, a Houston
area ISP. John Perry, a person well known to this list and the remailer
community in general, is a Senior Systems Administrator at Phoenix.

On Thursday I received a call from John. Some others at Phoenix had just
noticed a Mixmaster remailer he had been running on one of their machines.
Phoenix has several large corporate customers who need secure transactions
for some special applications. The core engine of Mixmaster is well suited
to that purpose. They offered to license the code from me to use as the
framework on which to build these other programs. In the process they will
rewrite many basic functions in Mixmaster that need major overhaul (e.g.,
key management). We will incorporate those improvements back into
Mixmaster. This should lead to porting Mixmaster to several other
platforms, and to fixing most of my worst coding atrocities.

I had never considered licensing Mixmaster, but I know John Perry both
personally and by reputation. He has thoroughly assuaged my fears that
Phoenix would try to weaken or restrict Mixmaster in any way. John will be
leading this project on the Phoenix end. He asked that I delay the release
of the next version of Mixmaster pending clarification of every one's
intentions. Now that we have reached an understanding the planned release
of Mixmaster version 2.0.2 will take place as soon as I can get it ready.

There are no plans to sell Mixmaster clients or servers. They will
continue
to be released free with source code. I will still control the contents of
all releases of Mixmaster. All future versions of Mixmaster will be
backward compatible. There will be no "Legal Kludges" preventing old
clients from working with new remailers, and new clients will be able to
generate old message formats.  Currently there are no plans to change the
message format at all. 

      -Lance Cottrell

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-- 
Lance Cottrell   loki@obscura.com
PGP 2.6 key available by finger or server.
Mixmaster, the next generation remailer, is now available!
http://obscura.com/~loki/Welcome.html or FTP to obscura.com

"Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra.  Suddenly
it flips over, pinning you underneath.  At night the ice
weasels come."
                        --Nietzsche