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Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious: what was the rationale for not talking about this at all until it was ready? It seems like "we're working on a possible solution" would have been a good response to the many complaints about this.

Was there some reason to believe that mentioning you were working towards this license would have a detrimental effect on the review process for that license?

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I mentioned it many times, actually:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22630340

https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1250200008621608962?s...

Thanks for clarifying; the mention of "advocating" hadn't seemed connected to the idea of obtaining a "license".

Congratulations on prevailing here.

My guess is two reasons:

- Expectations settings. If they say they're working on a possible solution, people will expect the solution to materialize and get upset when it doesn't. Since this seems like it was a lobbying effort with OFAC, there was probably a large degree of uncertainty on whether this would happen at all.

- Like you suggested, maybe they thought any public comment about this might put at risk the conversations they were having with OFAC?

If they had been denied the licence then it’s potentially misleading. Generally you don’t comment on things if there is a very realistic chance they’re unachievable.

Why would it be misleading to say they are applying for a license?

Because this is the Internet and the angry mob often doesn't understand how the real world works, and the cognitive load of dealing with that angry mob when said things don't go the way they've naively imagined it _must_ is exhausting.

I'd imagine that later saying your license was denied would direct the internet mob in your favour, not against you.

We can certainly agree to disagree! ;-)

That would work on the hypothesis that the internet mob is a rationale agent. That may not be so.

I'm going to guess that the US government wouldn't have appreciated the external pressure going public about it would've added onto their review process.

as a software engineer, you have some* control over the scheduling and cadence of your features you develop.

You have no control over when you get a permit from the government like this. It's nuts. Even when the open source exception to ITAR was passed in the late 90s MIT was very careful not to release kerberos V outside the USA until they had very clear guarantees that it was approved.

Saying "we are applying for an OFAC license" will lead to a deluge of other tech companies applying for the same license, and the likely outcome is the OFAC says "we don't have the manpower to review all these, reject them all".

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