Mozilla Firefox Not In Violation of U.S Government Export Rules

Posted by red5 on Sep 18, 2009 7:51 PM EDT
InternetNews.com; By Sean Kerner 		Mail this story
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While the Internet may know no borders, the U.S Government does. There are a number of rules including encryption export regulations from the U.S Department of Commerce and export sanctions by the Department of Treasury that affect software vendors. But what do you do when your application is open source and freely available to anyone in the world? Do the same the rules apply? It's a question that Mozilla asked the U.S government about. The answer they received could have profound implications not just for Firefox but for all open source software vendors. "We really couldn't accept the notion that these government rules could jeopardize the participatory nature of an open source project so we sought to challenge it," Harvey Anderson VP and General Counsel of Mozilla told InternetNews.com. "We argued that First Amendment free speech rights would prevail in this scenario. The government took our filing and then we got back a no violation letter which is fantastic."

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Weren't the restrictions lifted? Sander_Marechal 6 1,326 Sep 21, 2009 2:27 PM
Go Gov't chalbersma 4 1,662 Sep 21, 2009 12:50 AM

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