Are any of the Linux distributions unencumbered by US export controls? This is the first time I have come across this but it seems that countries listed as being restricted with the US Department of Commerce can not purchase products from virtually any company due to some tie that company might have with a US subsidiary or shareholder. As I understand it, a French, British of Germany company can’t sell a piece of software to a Iranian company if the French, German or British company has a shareholder located in the US. Is that about right? Is there any way of getting around such restrictions, say purchasing in the European country and importing from there?

Okay, so there are no comments on this, huh? Well for those who have ever taken a stroll through some of the countries on the US banned list you will notice that you can buy the latest and greatest Intel based PC and most people run Microsoft Windows on those PCs. So, I am wondering how they do it. Presumably, as good US companies, Intel and Microsoft aren’t violating the US embargo on these countries but the proliferation of this stuff makes you have to wonder how they get their hands on boxes of Windows XP etc. Sure, it could all be shipped via other places but that presumably would violate export laws in the US even if the products have never been anywhere near the US. So, is there any way to legally implement a Linux solution in a country that is under the thumb of the US trade and Commerce department?

Of interest, I compared the Embargoed list of countries from the US Department of Commerce against the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office export controls and found that trade between the UK and Angola, Cuba, Iran, Libya, and Serbia and Montenegro (Former Yugoslavia) is perfectly legitimate providing that in most of these cases it has nothing to do with military or arms which is fair enough. Interestingly, Afghanistan, North Korea, Syria are not even given mention with any restriction in the UK FCO listing. I also find it quite amazing that the US would still be forcing an embargo on places like Serbia and Montenegro, wasn’t the US military over there a few years ago getting ride of that guy Milosevic? Isn’t he now on trial in the Hague?

There is also something else here that might be of interest, Linux is purported to be freely available to anyone, however the hardware needed to run the operating system is all restricted in one way or another by US trade restrictions! You also have to ask the question, if the Linux source code is available online (via Linux.org which I believe is hosted in the US) and can be accessed either directly or indirectly by someone in one of the embargoed countries, is Linux.org violating the US trade restrictions? I seem to remember something like this came up over PGP a few years ago but don’t know what the outcome was.

don't know much about this, but aren't the majority of the PCs built somewhere other than the US? Companies in some country might buy the intel chips perfectly legally and use them to assemble computers that they then export. Intel probably can't be held responsible for what happens after they have sold their products perfectly legally.

And windows and other software might ship without srong encrpytion - though it's not all that hard to get around that. I'm not sure how things are now but when I was in college, I could not legally download a version of netscape that supported strong encryption while I was in Japan. Of course, legally downloading and downloading are two things

I’m not very clear on this either, hence my questions but as I understand it, if Intel knew a manufacturer was going to ship motherboards or fully completed PCs directly or indirectly to an embargoed country then they COULD be held accountable. Of course if they didn’t know then it would be hard to enforce but the US Department of Commerce puts the onus on the originator or exporter to determine if the products will end up in an embargoed country. I think that probably has to do with the difficulties of going after someone in another country when they purchased a product in that country or a third country and how a US law can apply or be enforced when you haven’t broken any local laws. So, even if you could buy a product outside the US such as an Intel chip, are you required to provide details of the final destination of that Pentium CPU when buying it? Local laws here don’t require that but I suppose ethically, knowing that the destination country is embargoed by the US, the supplier or supplier’s supplier, or supplier’s supplier’s supplier, should have a choice as they would be the ones in trouble in the end. Or would they?

Even if the PC, chips, drives, software, etc etc are built outside the US and never go anywhere near the US, it is the company ownership issue that seems to apply as far as I can tell. I say this because SuSE is a German company but was purchased by Novell, a US company and even though Germany has major trade relations with some of these countries, SuSE isn’t allowed (or at least they say they aren’t allowed) to ship their products to or destined for a country on the US embargoed list. Great huh?

US owned companies may not be allowed to export to stuff to the embargoed countries but I think the companies that actually assemble the PC are typically small companies that aren't owned by US citizens. So long as intel and others take 'reasonable' precaution, they are probably fine.

I think this whole embargo thing is silly for most things. No one can control where freely downloadable software ends up with and intel chips are a commodity that you can get hold all over the world. and whether or not someone can build a bomb has nothing to do with having intel chips and windows. people managed to fly to the moon without intel chips.

I'm moving this thread to linux general as, well err.. it's a general linux discussion!

cheers

Jamie...