Mozilla international win
By Pulkit Sharma

The Open Source software movement is one of the greatest idealistic collaborative efforts of the modern world.  Highly skilled techies have volunteered their time to create internet browser Mozilla Firefox which is used by more than 20 percent of people on the net.  Mozilla Firefox is a great product and best of all it is free.

Quite separately, the US Government has very strict rules that prohibit any American based company to export any software to its enemies North Korea, Iran and Cuba.  This applied to every American tech company be it Microsoft or open source Mozilla.  There were no exceptions till now.

The US Government has now given the nod to Mozilla after it put in a petition explaining that the open source movement relies of voluntary contributors and users from every country.  And so any such US Government ban would be impossible to enforce on a company that depends on volunteers.  Many feel that the US Government only gave permission for Mozilla Firefox to be downloaded to countries like Cuba and Iran was because of the backlash from the open source community if they refused.  The Open Source community is characterized by its intelligent single mindedness to create free software for everyone.  If antagonized, these volunteer software workers are formidable opponents.

Internetnews is reporting

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Mozilla Firefox Cleared of U.S Export Rules

While the Internet may know no borders, the U.S Government does.

At it happens, numerous export controls from the Commerce and Treasury departments cast a long shadow over the software industry, but Mozilla has secured a critical exemption that could have a broad impact on the open source movement.

"We really couldn't accept the notion that these government rules could jeopardize the participatory nature of an open source project so we sought to challenge it," Mozilla General Counsel Harvey Anderson told InternetNews.com. "We argued that First Amendment free speech rights would prevail in this scenario. The government took our filing and then we got back a no-violation letter, which is fantastic."
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