Re: Problem serving one-click installer to Syria

On 15/06/2010 03:28 م, Dave Page wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 12:16 PM, Greg Stark<gsstark@mit.edu>  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. 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.
>>
>> 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.
>>
> Greg is entirely correct. We cannot export or facilitate the export of
> cryto code to embargoed countries, such as Syria due to US export
> laws. This doesn't just apply to EnterpriseDB of course, it applies to
> the community as well, either where our servers are in the US, or the
> people working on them are in the US. The penalties for ignoring this
> are *extremely* harsh.
>
I want to ask you a tiny question, do you agree with this policy? if yes
go ahead and forbid your projects but not others projects (my friend
from Spain be came crazy when I told him that I can access the SVN
because US blocked my IP).

> The situation is ridiculous I know - it's easy to get OpenSSL from any
> number of places of course. As of this morning, we have people looking
> into the legal issues to see if there is a way that we (EnterpriseDB
> and the community) can make all our downloads available universally
> without putting anyone at risk of prosecution. We're also talking to
> other large organisations involved in Open Source to see if/how they
> deal with this within the projects they work on.
>
Thanks a lot for your efforts.


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