On Wed, Jun 14, 2006 at 11:16:54AM -0500, L. V. Lammert wrote: | Bottom line - nobody is going to change the US export regulations, we just | have to deal with them. If the license on vendor h/w & s/w **IS** to our | liking, there's no reason to dis them just because some lawyers MAKE them | verify that anyone downloading the docs is within the legal 'sphere' of | commerce. If registration is the ONLY complaint we have, that just COULD be | a symptom of their lawyers, so blame THEM and not everyone else.
If Mr. Cohen had come here and said "Sorry, but our lawyer(s) insist that we not make our interface documents open to people that don't play their game of 50 questions" then I don't think people would be blaming him for any of this. We'd just blame the lawyers. Instead, he tried to pass off a closed documention process as being an open one, and that is just not at all truthful. It's one thing for lawyers to be igorant about markets and play extra safe harbor so they don't have to do the hard analysis to figure out ways for the company to legally do this. It's quite another for someone else to come and try to gloss over a bad decision with a lie. If the company wants to make bad decisions, so be it. But what Mr. Cohen did was at the very best a form of mis-representation about the decision. Maybe Hifn's lawyer should be the one coming online, instead. Ultimately, that does seem to be where the bad decisions originate, and it would help eliminate a layer of communication that seems quite possibly to be one that is passing bad information in both directions.
