NSA and GPL?

[Tracy R Reed <treed@ultraviolet.org>]

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I hope this hasn't been hashed over before but the following email came
across the local LUG mailing list and I was wondering if anyone had any
comment on it. Did the NSA really not understand the implications of the
GPL when they started the project? How is that possible?

-- 
Tracy Reed      http://www.ultraviolet.org

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From: Ray Simard <ray.simard@sylvan-glade.com>
To: kplug-list@kernel-panic.org
Subject: MicroSophistry
Date: Mon, 27 Jan 2003 17:48:16 -0800
Message-ID: <200301271748.16645.ray.simard@sylvan-glade.com>

From the "Ignorance is not only bliss; it's ubiquitous" Dept.

>http://www.wininformant.com/Articles/Index.cfm?Action=Comments&ArticleID=27104

"Re: Congressman attacking 'open source' Actually, rather than attacking 'open 
source' per se, the Congressman was attacking the GPL, the Gnu Public 
License. (The Congressman, being just a mouthpiece, anyway, probably did not 
fully understand what he is doing.) Microsoft takes a very dim view of the 
GPL, as you know, and would argue that it makes it difficult for commercial 
software developers to use in commercial software, things which have appeared 
in open source under the GPL. Microsoft is going to be floating legislation 
to break the GPL."

echo "..commercial software developers to use in commercial software..." | \ 
                bs2txt -MS
...us to keep for ourseves...
=== 

" 'Others in the government don't share Smith's opinion, however, with the 
Pentagon, NSA and other agencies embracing Linux and other open source 
solutions.'

"Given the fact that Dick Schafer, a deputy director of the NSA, publicly 
announced his agency's reversal on their support for the Security Enhanced 
Linux project (“We didn’t fully understand the consequences of releasing 
software under the GPL” said Mr. Schafer and noted that the GPL issue created 
so many problems for the security agency that “we won't be doing anything 
like that again.”) in August 2002, I think that "embracing" might be too 
strong a word..."

I'd like to find out more about this. Sounds like a believer in 
security-through-obscurity at NSA.

Ray S.


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