While the Internet may know no borders, the U.S Government does. There are a number of rules including encryption export regulations from the U.S Department of Commerce and export sanctions by the Department of Treasury that affect software vendors. But what do you do when your application is open source and freely available to anyone in the world? Do the same the rules apply?

Microsoft's political sanctions provoke Cuba; President of Microsoft Russia temporarily becomes a journalist

In a move that must surely strike at the very core of open source, FOSS, and the heart of GNU crusader Richard Stallman, SourceForge has now blocked all access from by countries on the U.S. 'Foreign Assets Control sanction list'.

Sourceforge ignored users from Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria saying that it has to deal with USA laws. USA has very hard relationships with those countries, that is why open source, free software, hackers and people loving freedom must suffer, and Sourceforge is not against that.

The Obama Administration has forced Sourceforge to deny service to its anti-terrorism sanction list. In practical terms this means people in Cuba, North Korea, the Sudan, Syria and Iran get “403 forbidden” messages when they try to access sourceforge.org addresses. (Here’s how the Armenian Private School in Toronto, Canada displays 403 errors.)

Having watched how Microsoft included patents in its deal with then EU (more on this in the next post), it is worth pointing out that the US won’t extend antitrust sanctions, despite rising opposition and the recent decision in Europe.

I recently heard that Cuba had created their own Linux distribution, Nova. Like many other countries with a rocky relationship with the USA (Russia, China, Iran), Cuba is wary of running their entire computer infrastructure on software developed in the USA.

Source Forge has banned downloads from Syria, Iran, Sudan, Cuba, and North Korea. Funny enough, the decision came after US Secretary of State speech on Internet's freedom.
In Syria, the Open Source community is upset and felt that the decision is against principles of software freedom.

I decided to try out the latest Fedora, 11, over the weekend. The biggest reason is that the company I work for "sanctions" the use of Fedora on corporate machines.