Ship Code! Re: House Intelligence Committee Press Release

[Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>]

At 03:43 PM 9/12/97 -0400, Duncan Frissell wrote:
>Cute trick.  I wonder who's the "provider" of a GNU-licensed piece of 
>collectively-written software?

I am!  You are.  All of us.  Anybody providing it on a web site.
Anybody mailing packages overseas for university libraries.
Anybody contributing to development or submitting bug fixes (that get used :-)
Anybody who writes a math subroutine or a tutorial or a shell script.
Anybody who wants to join.  

>And is the law satisfied by a program which ships with a GAK module and
has a 
>nice installation program that automatically (or after asking) rips it out
by 
>the roots.

It's probably written in a way that gives vaguely-defined extensive
rulemaking powers
to ill-identified Adminicrats while exempting them from judicial review,
returning us to the good old FUD days where you can only get permission
if you're Nice.  

On the other hand, PGP 5.0 has a perfectly usable GAK feature,
not that the Fedz would approve it.  It's the "Always encrypt to default key",
which is primarily intended for keeping copies in a form you can read later,
but would work just as well with the FBI key instead.