Hacker News Reader

Comment by pdw | Hacker News Reader

It was all extremely silly. Debian took a different approach: before 2005, they put all crypto packages in a separate "non-US" archive, hosted in the Netherlands. American developers weren't allowed to upload there. That way, Debian never exported crypto code from the United States, it only ever imported it.

View on HN

Yep, US export restrictions ended up spurring foreign investment in crypto like Thawte (founded by Mark Shuttleworth) and SSLeay (later forked as OpenSSL).

There was a story of a hundred programmers taking the program PRINTED ON PAPER to a conference in Sweden to type it in again, because somehow export of binaries was forbidden but not the printed version of it. Is it true? Which event organized this?

The PGP source code was published as a book so that it could be exported under the theory that the first amendment beats ITAR. https://philzimmermann.com/EN/essays/BookPreface.html

> A book comprised entirely of thousands of lines of source code looks pretty dull. But then so does a nondescript fragment of concrete -- unless it happens to be a piece of the Berlin Wall, which many people display on their mantels as a symbol of freedom opening up for millions of people. Perhaps in the long run, this book will help open up the US borders to the free flow of information.

This is beautiful.

I believe OpenBSD (based in Canada) was in a similar situation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com