E Is Free!!! Mark S. Miller (markm@caplet.com)
Fri, 14 Jan 2000 13:09:04 -0800

At 08:31 AM 1/13/00 , Mark S. Miller wrote:
>So, should I feel free to drop daffE, incorporate Tyler's changes into the
>domestic source tree, build E domestically, and distribute it from a
>domestic site? For E, since it's open source, is the nonsense over? Is it
>safe? Opinions please, before I take this step. Thanks.

Well, I take it that the answer to my question is a definitive YES! The long dark night is over. A fitting way to see out the century of statism. With this freedom, we may now be able to re-acquire all the others we've lost. This one was just a battle, not the war, but it was a damn important battle! How should we celebrate?

For a start, let's all give a big round of virtual applause to Tyler Close, who, without compensation, and promptly and professionally for over a year, has turned each release of US-exportable daffE into internationally distributed E. HIP HIP HORRAY! Without this effort, our sense that we were building a liberating piece of security technology would have been vastly diminished.

Thanks also to Lucky Green and the folks at cypherpunks.to for hosting the E download site in a free country.

daffE is hereby dead. I am now working on the next release of E, which for various obscure reasons will be known as E 0.8.7 (the current release is 0.8.4). Lucky, if it's alright with you, I expect to continue to post these on cypherpunks.to, as well as domestically. In 0.8.7, I will use & bundle Cryptix-3.1.1, which is compatible with both Java 1.1 and Java 1.2. At a later time, I expect to switch to Cryptix-JCE-1.2, which is also compatible with both Java's, and is also compatible with Java 2's JCE-1.2.

There are many changes from 0.8.4 to 0.8.7, so 0.8.4 will continue to be available for awhile. More in the upcoming release notes.

This has to be the strangest reason yet to be open-source.

So, how else should we celebrate? 

         Cheers,
         --MarkM