Re: Problem serving one-click installer to Syria

On 15/06/2010 02:16 م, Greg Stark wrote:

On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 7:58 AM, Stefan Kaltenbrunner
<stefan@kaltenbrunner.cc> wrote: 

yeah - We really can't discriminate against some of our users in that
way(and we are not doing that on any of our other sites). If we cannot get
this fixed in a generic way we really need to look into alternative ways -
at least for people being affected by that - to get to the one-click
installer.   

Well South Korea would have been obviously just a mistake. But I would
expect it to be an issue for any US company to server IPs in Syria,
North Korea, Cuba, Iran, or Burma/Myanmar. 

This issue found in some cases not all, for example we can buy from Microsoft products and many other websites where we can't download or contribute in MySQL, sf.net, OpenOffice or even reading specific articles at IBM although there are some old contributors from Syria and the other blacklisted countries in many open source projects and many many projects owned by non-American people or even Americans believe in freedom and don't agree with forbidding policy for open source stuffs.

Actually I don't know what
restrictions there would be for a product that isn't being sold but I
wouldn't be surprised if they wanted to be conservative and just not
serve those IPs at all. 

OK if they wanted to be conservative why they accept payments from these IPs? why they allow users of theses IPs to use US e-mail services? why they allow us to use facebook or Twitter where don't for scientific articles? where they don't allow us to just read a non-atomic article?

OOOH I got, this is the modern democracy! Thanks a lot Mr. Obama & Mrs. Clinton they want to liberate us from communist or socialistic dictators where they didn't worst than them.

For the community it might be tricky to solve since many of the
servers are hosted or sponsored by US organizations. Having some
servers with different rules than others might complicate matters
significantly. 

No I think the problem can be solved easily just make mirrors outside US.

For example before moving some open source projects we asked Launchpad admins if they apply US rule for blacklist counties and they answered No the open source must be opened for the humanity not for specific peoples this is clear principle (their servers in UK). Same answer I got from BerliOS (in Germany). For that many open source projects decided to move outside sf.net (US server) to GNA (French), Launchpad, BerliOS and many other open source hosting services.

-- 
Best Regards
Muhammad Bashir Al-Noimi
My Blog: http://mbnoimi.net