I have no idea about "IDEA."

[none none]

--- Johan Wevers <johanw@vulcan.xs4all.nl> wrote:
> > As an individual, I don't care much either, but corporations
> > have a duty to their shareholders and employees to stay out
> > of trouble
> 
> Hmmm. I don't have the impression they don't care much about that
> recently...

Certainly a large number do (even if you assign a relatively small
percentage of all corporations that do).

> > (including simply avoiding bad publicity for the theft of intellectual
> > property
> 
> If this were considered to be theft, it would be in a different section
> of the lawbooks.

Theft of intellectual property usually falls under copyright law, at
least in the United States.

> > - even if some guarantee of no additional consequences existed).
> 
> Perhaps this is looked at a bit different in the USA, but I doubt most
> countries care if no consequences would follow.

I don't like making broad cultural statements, but people here (in
particular competitors and enemies) have developed the talent of using
negative publicity to a remarkable degree. And public knowledge of
use of non-licensed software would likely arouse the interest of the
BSA (the software police - they can seize a the entire IT infrastructure
of a company for the purpose on auditing it, and, if the company does
not have perfect documentation for all non-free software, bad things WILL
happen).

> But since IDEA was implemented in pgp 2.x, it received much more attention.

But it has no future. Where will they get NEW customers? No one wants to put
a non-free algorithm in their product with reasonable free alternatives
available. In addition, all of the research into the strength of the various
algorithms has moved to AES, Blowfish, and Twofish.

> I don't follow the developments on that subject very closely - are they
> finally building cfs into the standard kernel, instead of having to go
> to http://www.kerneli.org for it?

Yes. It seems our government has finally developed at least a small amount
of sense with regards to this issue.

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