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Re: Gates steps down :



Leonid Igolnik - LiM wrote:
> 
> http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/special/gatesout.html

Chaza"l called it: "Yerida LeZorech Alia" (don't have any idea how to
translate it to English...).

Anyway, the big story of today is another, if we are in the issue of
"news". Today is a historic day for Open-Source. The American govt
relaxes the crypto rules, especially for Open-Source. It is expected
for about a month (a month ago, they mentioned the January 14 as the
date for publishing the new rules). But the new rules already leaked
and everybody in this list probably read them already (in Slashdot,
LinuxToday, and other zillion resources). The old rules hurt the
Open-Source world heavily in the past, and crypto authors were forced
to develop their stuff as patches, rather than integrated parts of
the source trees of the original software (ewxamples: mod_ssl, Ben-
SSL, iLinux - the patches to the Linux kernel, etc.). As one who is
involved in some of such projects, I know the meaning of the change
of the policy well, and I'm sure that it will give Open-Source a
strong push. The main push will come on October, when the RSA patent
expires. The only sad fact is that Verisign tries to buy Thawte and
to build a monopoly much stronger than Microsoft's or Intel's (more
than 99%!  The only CA known by current browsers!); Let's hope that
the court will disallows it (I'm skeptical about it...).

-- 
Eli Marmor

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