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Ripping a morsel of a meal from the talons of El Reg, we end up with something indigestible.
Rapid7, the flingers of the exploitation / testing framework that is Metasploit have revealed the effect of recent US regulatory changes via their blog.
A snippet:
Due to changes in regulatory requirements that are applicable to Metasploit (Pro and Community) and similar products, as of Sunday, April 19, 2015, individuals outside of the US and Canada who would like to use Metasploit Pro or the Metasploit Community Edition will need to request a licence and provide additional information regarding themselves or their organization designation.
In accordance with the new requirements, the request will be reviewed by Rapid7 and, unless the user is a non-US or non-Canadian government agency (or is otherwise ineligible to receive the products without approval from the US Department of Commerce), the request will be fulfilled.
This affects licence requests made through Rapid7.com as well as any third party sites that currently offer Metasploit Pro or Community products for download.
It seems we are yet again on the Magic Roundabout of encryption export controls and Clipper chip madness... who knows, maybe this time around it will be effective.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by choose another one on Thursday April 23 2015, @12:12PM
...only without systemd, which of course is a RedHat product and hence from the US.
That may be for the better, except that alternatives for stuff now subsumed into systemd are looking thin on the ground and possibly not maintained - e.g. ConsoleKit.
Bigger problem is the much of GNU is at least partly US maintained / hosted, and the HURD is clearly a weapon of mass obstruction.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday April 23 2015, @01:42PM
There are systemd-free Linux distros. Some of them are even commercially distributed and supported. And a lot of the software that has been "subsumed" by systemd still exists as source code. And a lot of that activity is based outside the US. Much of the US-written free software has already been exported, and surely, if non-US maintainers are needed, they can be recruited from the non-US users if that should become necessary.
For example, the soon-(I hope)-to-be-released Devuan fork of Debian is free of systemd and based in servers in the Netherlands.
-- hendrik