On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 12:25 PM, Carnë Draug <[email protected]> wrote: > On 28 April 2010 12:23, David Bateman <[email protected]> wrote: >> Errr, except that there exists the concept of reexportation. If Octave is >> deemed as a projet to reside in the US (and I'd say that it does), >> reexportation in contravention of the export controls of the original >> country (For example US -> Portugal -> Cuba) is also illegal by >> international treaty... So no dice there either >> > > Hmm... I didn't knew this. Could you please clarify me some things on > this point, then? Does this means that contributions I make for > projects that reside in the USA, such as octave-forge, are bound in > some way to the USA (even tough I am not), and that if in the case > they one day end up being covered by a rule that blocks their > exportation, they will be bound by such rules and I won't be allowed > to distribute it myself by some other means?
I'm not a lawyer, but I assume that export rules cannot be applied retroactively (at least I'm pretty sure that in the case of the USA the Constitution explicitly forbids it). So in the future you could be prevented from downloading the software from the US, but they cannot punish you (or US-based developers) for legal copies you already possess. The GPL grants you the right to redistribute the software, but I don't know how reexportation factors in there... that's a pretty interesting situation. I heard a report years ago about someone trying to reexport the linux kernel under a closed-source license via reexportation from a Native American nation in the US but I don't think that went anywhere. --judd ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Octave-dev mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/octave-dev
