Walaykum Assalam
While we need someone with more legal background to share here..
IMHO there is two sides here in this law/decision/whatever, which we need US taxpayers from all FLOSS community to lobby against until this
sanction ends, at least for FOSS projects, for the following reasons :
this decision says "goods and services"
Hosting is a service
Software - in our context - is a product, or goods
"You represent you are not a person on a list barring you from receiving
services under U.S. laws or other applicable jurisdiction...."
The case of open source software products is different than the proprietary one, which this law is likely to be talking about.
Open source projects are under the will of its creators and developers, who - only - have the right of it, control it, and own
its license decision.
Therefore, it's not a US product or US goods. It is a collaborative software, where there is sometimes no one US citizen in its team.
Therefore, this law, when carefully interpreted, cannot and should not apply sanction against the legal controller or user of an international collaborative project, regardless of his or her nationality, as this software is not a US one, while it still being accessed through US networks.
>From this point, if a legal effort properly made, sanction on Open source projects might be lifted as exception.
There is also a significant US interest in such a change, or exception, as these software projects are beneficial to US, which
benefit from all users' input and bug reports from all over the world, totally unlike its proprietary counterparts. So US individual and institutional users cannot be fully benefited from this collaborative software without making access to it international.
Mohamed
-----Original Message-----
From: Ahmed MANSOUR <911freak at gmail dot com>
To: General Arabization Discussion <general at arabeyes dot org>
Sent: Sun, Jan 24, 2010 1:29 pm
Subject: Re: [general] SourceForge banned Syria, Sudan, Iran and others
Salam alikom,
The problem is not with open source developers or individual website
as all they do is to
just apply more or less the stupid US laws related to software export.
you can still use mirror site to download the software you need, and
host your code in the future on non US based servers.
It is for this reason that cryptography based projects like GnuPG and
OpenBSD use work mainly on European and Canadian servers.
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