SourceForge Blocks Syria, Sudan, Iran, N. Korea & Cuba | Hacker News Reader

SourceForge Blocks Syria, Sudan, Iran, N. Korea & Cuba

arabcrunch.com

24 pointsjcapote31 comments

It’s hard to say SourceForge is in the wrong, given they’re subject to US law. On the other hand, I can’t say they’re in the right, because it does clearly violate the principles of open source/free software. Such situations are unfortunate, but the best solution seems to be ‘hope the law doesn’t come for you’. Not a long-term option.

Is is hardly surprising though as these countries fall under OFAC Sanctions. Google employ the same policies on Project hosting btw, ref: http://code.google.com/projecthosting/terms.html - part 5.

See: http://ustreas.gov/offices/enforcement/ofac/

You could argue then that they are in breach of the GPL on stuff they do use themselves.

You can hardly take GPL source, modify it and refuse to distribute it to certain groups - wether this is your choice or a rule imposed by your country

But you can. What the GPL says is that if you distribute/sell the object code, you must distribute the source code as well. So you have no obligation to distribute anything to anyone, but if you do distribute the code, you are obliged to distribute the source.

Quoting from Stallman's The Free Software Definition:

You should also have the freedom to make modifications and use them privately in your own work or play, without even mentioning that they exist. If you do publish your changes, you should not be required to notify anyone in particular, or in any particular way.

http://www.fsf.org/licensing/essays/free-sw.html

You can hardly take GPL source, modify it and refuse to distribute it to certain groups - wether this is your choice or a rule imposed by your country

A particular country's law takes precedence over the GPL.

So if your country's laws says you can't full fill your obligations in the GPL then you can't use it?

You can't modify and distribute it. The GPL doesn't affect you if you just run the program. (Section 9 of GPLv3 says this explicitly and several sections of GPLv2 imply it)

What section of the GPL do these rules keep you from your obligations under?

Remember that the GPL does not require that you distribute to anyone. Instead it says that if you do distribute then you must provide source and cannot prevent the recipient's freedom to further redistribute. But regulations saying that you cannot personally distribute to person A don't prevent you from distributing to anyone else, so long as you follow the requirements of the copyright license.

You can refuse to distribute GPLed software to anyone you want.

The fact that the Nexus One phone has GPLed software in it doesn't obligate Google to give me one.

The purpose of the GPL is to ensure that 1) When you do distribute the program to someone in binary format, you also make available the source and 2) You don't restrict their rights to modification and distribution with additional requirements.

Proxies can be used to get the software from SF in these countries.

The issue is about principles: freedom to innovate, free access, and to follow open source principles that SF preaches:

The Open Source Definition Open source doesn’t just mean access to the source code.

The distribution terms of open-source software must comply with the following criteria: … 5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons. 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor.

For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.

The blockhead action is a direct Discrimination Against around 200 million innocent people in Syria, Sudan, Iran, N Korea and Cuba.

Somehow I missted that point in history when Open Source, from just an idiom and good philosophy for programmers, turned into big and dirty politics. This is all very disappointing.

I'm confused, can't the source be downloaded from a mirror in another country? I always use heanet.ie when downloading from SourceForge.

Why yes it can. Following laws leads to people doing silly things. A US based mirror is supposed to not distribute to certain countries. But it can distribute to a third country that can distribute anywhere it wants. So no transmission of data is actually stopped, but the US based mirror has successfully followed US law and caused some annoyance to a handful of countries the USA does not like.

Handful of countries? More like a handful of people in a few countries.

What if those handful people had started/contributed to some open source project? Now they don't have access to their own code.

My point was that the laws don't even hamper countries the law's implementor doesn't like. They just hamper a very few select people.

Banning them actually has the opposite effect - aren't we trying to spread democracy? Dictators want their people to be isolated, so that they don't know that there is a better world out there. I won't be surprised if China welcomes Google's departure.

By arming the people with tools, anything to spread information, we're actually helping take down the dictators. Have you guys heard about the people near the border of North Korea (on the "safe" side), attaching radio receivers to balloons and flying them into North Korea? The citizens of North Korea are walled off from the rest of the world and don't have access to information.

By giving them information, and allowing them to share it among themselves, we can sow seeds of dissent (so to speak), so that they can organize an uprising (so to speak) to demand a better quality of life ... and take down the government.

I'm not so much advocating starting a riot, I'm just saying that our sanction on tools and information to them is having the opposite effect of what is genuinely good for the folks in the country.

This is probably just one of SourceForge's lawyer's overzealous misinterpretation of the law. (That's what lawyers are paid to do, of course.)

My question is, is SourceForge really "exporting" anything? Last time I checked how the Internet worked, SourceForge sent the packets to its ISP, and the ISP handled it from there. (Repeat until the packets are at their destination.)

(If the law says, "you must not transmit a packet addressed to a host in <list of countries>", then I guess that makes sense. But I have a feeling there is no such wording.)

Anyway, people in those countries should definitely be using Tor. So this will just remind them of that.

Isn't it ironic? They block the page to a specific group of people based on "5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups".

They also potentially cut off the access for people who have their main project site at sf.net - which leaves everyone using the software without updates from a trusted/original source in case of security issues.

Not really because a software license agreement can't supersede the laws of the country in which it is executed. Also the license only stipulates that you make the source available to people you distribute the compiled binary to so if they block the whole site it's hard to argue they are breaking the letter of the agreement.

aha what about clinton's Internet freedom speech? US secretary of State Hillary Clinton few days urged Internet freedom! as she said: “We stand for a single Internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas,” said Clinton in a major address that cited China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt among countries that censored the Internet or harassed bloggers!

Long live equal access dah!

Well, maybe that speech was the first step toward a proposal to change the law. That's hypocritical of Clinton to say that, I agree. That is besides the point though, here we are talking about the actions of SF as they relate to the law and the GPL, not the actions of the American government.

yes i know Open source projects form Syria hosted on SF! how bad this is.

I don't really understand how this got down modded.

This is a direct violation of the freedoms of Free Software and section 5 of opensource definition: “5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups”.

Github is US-hosted so presumably it has to follow suit?

This sounds like SourceForge trying very hard to be relevant. The policy makes no sense whatsoever.

It's to comply with US laws that state that nothing can be 'exported' to the aforementioned countries. In this case, software downloads are considered exports.

Those are bizarre laws.

And why it is ok for Facebook to launch a Parisian version and to Twitter to postpone its maintenance few days when there was unrest in Iran? Iranians revolting against their government where not terrorists? but when they use Open Source they are terrorist!

This is politics. Politics has no common sense, it acts in favour of small group of people whose intenations we can hardly recognize.

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