[Cryptography Team] Cryptography Team and Freedom Software Law Center Meeting Update

[Ron Teitelbaum]

Hello All,

I met with Dan Ravicher, he is the Legal Director at the Software Freedom
Law Center.  We had a very nice conversation about the Cryptography Team's
issues.  We also covered general squeak licensing issues because of our
talks with Cincom about porting their cryptography code to squeak.  There
are two things that need to happen before they will agree to represent us,
none of which I believe will be a problem.

First we need to provide a legal entity and ensure we have permission to
engage software freedom org to represent the community.  I have worked with
Cees and have been introduced by way of a very nice email to the board at
ESUG.  I will keep you informed on that progress.

Second we need to sign an engagement agreement to set up the Attorney Client
Relationship.  The agreement basically says they agree to represent us for
no charge.

We have discussed registration issues for US Export of cryptography.  They
assure me that they can handle this for us and have agreed to start the
process pending our formal agreement.

I also discussed the potential of porting the Cincom code and they agreed to
help work out the issues if Cincom agrees with our proposal.  I hope that
these conversations will be fruitful since it would be very good for all.

We also discussed the general squeak licensing issues.  Dan wanted to know
more information about what the issues were in general and I have passed
along to him a link to the license discussion page.  The summary that I gave
him was that we are covered under SqueakL but would prefer to move the
entire squeak project to MIT and that there have been a number of objections
to using LGPL.  Cees has already pointed out once that those objections
might be baseless but Marcus points out that LGPL may be viral and the
license doesn't play well outside of C libraries.  So I believe it would be
a good thing to at least shore up our options so a decision can be made and
a path to follow is illuminated.

I also mentioned our other lawyer volunteer Polly Dinkle, and Dan said he
would be very pleased to discuss this project with her.  I'm sure an
introduction between the two would be very good.  Matt I'll leave it to you.
You can introduce the subject to Polly, do the introduction between Dan and
Polly yourself, or I would still be very happy to have the meeting between
the three of us first before the introduction.  

I am happy to report the meeting went well and that it is my feeling that
very good things will come from our new relationship with Freedom Software.

Sincerely, 

Ron Teitelbaum
President / Principal Software Engineer
US Medical Record Specialists
Ron at USMedRec.com 
Squeak Cryptography Team Leader