“When the Clinton administration recently announced plans to
relax restrictions on exports of data-scrambling software, a key
issue that escaped notice was that the new policies affect only
shrink-wrapped software, not the original source code — the lines
of instructions that programmers actually write.”
“When it comes to source code, the undersecretary of commerce
for export administration, William Reinsch, said last week that
“nothing has changed.”
“The exclusion of source code from the relaxed rules
threatens to constrain software developed under the so-called
open-source model, most notably the Linux operating system, an
upstart competitor to Microsoft’s Windows.“