[lsb-discuss] LSB conf call notes for 2008-05-14

Carlos Manuel Duclos Vergara carlos.duclos at trolltech.com
Thu May 15 07:52:53 PDT 2008


On Thursday 15 May 2008 16:44:09 Jeff Licquia wrote:
> Carlos Manuel Duclos Vergara wrote:
> > After talking to our legal department, they made very clear that we cannot
> > include any cryptographic code developed in the US because that will make
> > us subject of US export regulations. This means, that we cannot develop a wrapper
> > for NSS inside Qt (ie, no easy conversion for software written by using our api).
> > Since we are not the only software providers outside the US, this will affect other
> > software companies too. Therefore asking everybody outside the US to become
> > subjects of US export regulations at once, seems like a huge imposition.
> > So, our vote goes against using NSS as a default in LSB.
> 
> Aren't you already?  How do you provide these services under Windows or 
> Mac OS X?
> 

We are not under US export regulation because:
1. There are no US citizens working on any of the OpenSSL Wrapper
2. OpenSSL is not under US export regulations

And besides, we avoid making any cryptographic calculations inside Qt, since
we also sell Qt to the US market. That's why we offer a wrapper for OpenSSL, 
we only arrange some bits here and there but all the work is done by OpenSSL.
We had to go through a certification process to be classified as not under 
US export regulations, and if we add the NSS wrapper will be classified as
under US export regulations. The same thing will happen to any other product
that uses NSS, that does not happen with OpenSSL. So, we are strongly opposed
to defaulting to NSS as a cryptographic library for LSB.

And this is not only a commercial thing, distributions as debian will not ship anything
that can be classified as under US export regulations. They have the non-us repositories
but that requires that you provide two packages of your app, one with cryptography for the
non-us and one without cryptography for the normal repository.

-- 
Carlos Manuel Duclos Vergara
carlos.duclos at trolltech.com
QA Team Lead



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