Slashdot Mirror

I'm not arguing any sort of country superiority. Redhat does sell in Europe take http://www.redhat.de/ and http://www.redhat.fr/ for instance.

I had a similar problem with a customer needing code ported from unix to windows 2000, with some unix specific stuff in the code like forking processes etc. (This was about two years ago)
I looked around for several solutions and came across cygwin, which did the job.

The problem was that at that time it was property of Red Hat [http://www.redhat.de/software/cygwin/support/], who apparently were busy with anything but cygwin. Their website said something about $100.000 or something for a developer license, which was out of the question. Emails I sent were not answered, and i had to abandon the idea.

Similar story with Microsoft. The *one* guy i managed to get hold of wasn't even aware they had a product named Services For Unix. (Hello ?)

Different story with MKS. Unfortunately their toolkit was over-budget too, but at least they were trying to help me, and trying to sell me a product I needed, and very polite and helpful.
(Kudos to miss K. :)

I hope for their sake they got their act together at Red hat about cygwin now, cause they probably missed an opportunity to make some bucks and more importantly get a foothold in a big japanese electronics company's development division.

Yet another BBC ("bootable business card") cd is maintained by redhat.de (german subsidiary).

Although aimed mainly at redhat users, it's pretty comprehensive and you can debug/fiddle with your other partitions (win32, ntfs). It's fairly up-to-date, also.

Grab it here

Eh... this is not about where the headquarters are located, it's about exporting/selling in a market where the product potentially infringes on patents. Those two can be very different.

Anyone care to post a list of all the other Linux Distributors who do not let themselves be subjected to US IP Law?

All other distributions are subject to US IP law when selling/exporting products to the US. Where the product was developed or where the headquarters are is not important, it's where the product is exported/sold.

This is one of the best reasons why Redhat!=Linux and perhaps the one that will see RedHat either leave the US or simply crumble.

I don't understand your point. Main Red Hat headquarters are indeed in the US, but there are offices in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Japan. There are Red Hat developers all over the world.
Where the head office is doesn't have the big effect you seem to think, IMHO. When the export of SSH still was restricted, Red Hat Germany provided those SSH RPM packages on ftp to anyone outside the US wanting those, just like other distributions did.

Now just make sure you all visited petition.eurolinux.org

I've done so, and Red Hat is there =)

The European version contains some additional CDs.
Since net access is still very expensive in many countries in Europe, we decided we should include more packages (that can be simply downloaded in the rest of the world) in Europe.

The additions (including, of course, Parsec) will be available on ftp.redhat.de (unless licenses don't permit it) - parts of them, such as our new, credit card sized Rescue CD, are available already.

It's not about crypto regulations this time, it's about the #include RSA patent.

[Open]SSH uses RSA for host key authentication.

We've made RPMs available at ftp://ftp.redhat.de/pub/rh-addons/secur ity/, where the RSA patent doesn't apply, though.

AFAIK you may not use them in a place where the RSA patent applies, so don't get them unless you're outside of the US and any other contry that has the RSA patent.

Fortunately, the patent will expire later this year.

"Thanks" to the RSA patent, we can't ship SSH or OpenSSL (which is required by OpenSSH).
We are building RPMs for it at Red Hat Germany (where there is no RSA patent) though; they can be downloaded at
ftp://ftp.redhat.de/pub/rh-addons/s ecurity/6.2.

We will include them as soon as the RSA patent expires (later this year).

In the mean time, you can download official Red Hat packages for both ssh and openssh from our German servers. ftp://ftp.redhat.de/pub/rh-addons/securi ty.