There is no patent problem with using PGP 2.3a outside the U.S. Isn it offensive to impose a change on PGP users around the world to accommodate a legal problem in the U.S.?
To quote from the PGP 2.6 manual: Outside the United States, the RSA patent is not in force, so PGP users there are free to use implementations of PGP that do not rely on RSAREF and its restrictions. Hopefully, implementors of PGP versions outside the US will also switch to the new format, whose detailed description is available from MIT. If everyone upgrades before 1 September 1994, no one will experience any discontinuity in interoperability. We apologize to PGP users outside the U.S. We are asking them to undergo the inconvenience of making a change to the non-U.S. version of PGP for no technical reason. We hope that the effect of this change, which will remove any legal controversy from the use of PGP in the U.S., will benefit PGP users outside the U.S. as well as within the U.S.
