Re: [GNU-linux-libre] OpenJDK international use restrictions

[Sergio Durigan Junior]

On Monday, September 01 2014, Riley Baird wrote:

> OpenJDK is released under the GPL (with a linking exception), but on
> their website [1] they have the following text:
>
>> International Use Restrictions
>> Due to limited intellectual property protection and enforcement in
>> certain countries, the JDK source code may only be distributed to an
>> authorized list of countries. You will not be able to access the
>> source code if you are downloading from a country that is not on this
>> list. We are continuously reviewing this list for addition of other
>> countries.
>
> Does this make OpenJDK non-distributable by restricting the
> redistribution rights granted by the GPL?

IANAL.

This is a very interesting question (and enters in a grey area of legal
obligations...).  There was a relatively recent discussion about this on
Fedora as well, though this discussion unfortunately happened "under the
hood".

The link is:

<https://fedorahosted.org/irc-support-sig/ticket/157>

While the discussion was happening, I contacted rms and johns to ask for
help from the FSF on this subject, and they said they would contact
Fedora/Red Hat about it.  I am not sure they did (things sometimes are
not as transparent as I wish), but nevertheless the conclusion (from the
ticket) is that the text on the main page cannot be changed due to Red
Hat's obligation towards U.S.'s ridiculous export law.

That may be the case for OpenJDK as well.  But I am not sure what we can
do about it.

-- 
Sergio
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