RR's, PGP and licenses

Marten,

>  * Geert Jan,
>  * 
>  * My definition of commercial may be different than yours.  Neither the
>  * RIPE NCC nor Merit is profiting from the inclusion of PGP in the
>  * registry software. We are not selling the software and the organizations
>  * which are using the software are just recovering their operating costs -
>  * not making profits that are then paid out to stockholders or
>  * somebody.
> 
> For the RIPE NCC I think you are right. For MERIT I don't know, you
> probably know better than we do. However, MERIT, Inc. does not
> sound like a non-profit organisation ;-)  

Merit is a tax-exempt non-profit educational organization, officially
certified by the US Internal Revenue Service.  That's as official as
you can get for non-profit in this country.  Moreover, the project this
code is used for is directly funded by the US National Science Foundation;
that alone would probably qualify the project.

>                                           Besides that, I am not sure
> whether service providers that make use of the software are
> non-commercial companies... I am sure they are all doing this to make
> money, right?  Not that I really want to get into this discussion, but
> it is something to think about.

I could easily imagine that the server side of the code is covered, but
that the client sides at MCI or SprintNet or ANS COO+RE would not be
covered.  Good point.  We might have to bundle the client source in
such a way that a for-profit firm can load it with a fee-paid version
of RSA.  (And, presumably, be ready to supply information about how and
where they can officially pay the fee).

> 
>  * But no, we have not investigated this further - it seems like a non-
>  * problem.
> 
> It is better to investigate rather than find out afterwards that RSA
> does think this is a commercial purpose....

sigh.  True.

> 
> -Marten
> 

--Dale



-------- Logged at  Mon Nov 28 18:53:59 MET 1994  ---------