Free as in beer, but you still can’t have it!
According to this blog post from the SourceForge team, IP addresses from Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria will be blocked from accessing the site.
Since 2003, the SourceForge.net Terms and Conditions of Use have prohibited certain persons from receiving services pursuant to U.S. laws, including, without limitations, the Denied Persons List and the Entity List, and other lists issued by the U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Industry and Security. The specific list of sanctions that affect our users concern the transfer and export of certain technology to foreign persons and governments on the sanctions list. This means users residing in countries on the United States Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanction list, including Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria, may not post content to, or access content available through, SourceForge.net. Last week, SourceForge.net began automatic blocking of certain IP addresses to enforce those conditions of use.
I can appreciate that these nations have been placed under sanction, but theres a few things that the US gov should probably keep in mind:
- Its very easy to get around this denial of access: just use an open proxy from an IP thats not banned
- How does the US gov measure whether or not a site is major enough to warrant putting specific restrictions on its export? Surely the correct measure would be to determine how useful the code is, as opposed to the volume? With this in mind, surely every Linux distribution should also ban those IPs?
- Will the US gov now prosecute any bloggers/ “small scale” producers of code who don’t conform to this law?
