AFAIK, OpenBSD "chose" Canada, because Theo de Raadt already lived there?Theo was born in South Africa, but his family moved to Canada in the 1970s (also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theo_de_Raadt#Early_life).It was more of a "happy accident" that Canada was not the USA with its at the time, especially onerous cryptographic export restrictions.Relatedly, OpenSSH development benefited from individual contributors such as Niels Provos, who was also not an American citizen, but a grad student at the University of Michigan, being in close enough geographic proximity to Canada that he was able to drive the (relatively) short distance North across the US/Canadian boarder to contribute to OpenSSH (as mentioned here: https://www.openssh.com/history.html). Whereas early American OpenSSH contributors (e.g. Dug Song) were relegated to only touching pieces of code that had no direct cryptographic ramifications.CC: @
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