&gt; Just look at how hard it was to get decent (for the time) encryption software when the US and most countries treated it as highly regulated commodities, and that was without an intentional crackdown on everyone who writes and distributes such software.<p>Um, I assure you that the US Government was quite serious about preventing encryption export.<p>You are also ignoring history.  It was far harder <i>to get an operating system image</i>, period.  It was more cost effective for me to drive to a store and <i>buy a physical CD</i> than download over an internet connection in 1996.  The retail channel is fairly easy to control--nobody is going to spend the money to press CD&#x27;s and publish something that will get them raided by US marshals.<p>This has changed.  Dramatically.  Between higher bandwidth and bittorrent, you probably couldn&#x27;t stop the distribution on an OS image, nowadays.