[Board] One concern on obligations for OSGeo projects

[Frank Warmerdam]

Luis W. Sevilla wrote:
> (Sorry for the duplicated message, I sent with the wrong address)
> Hi to everyone,
> 
>  From gvSIG and taking into account the comments about obligations
> for OSGeo projects, we are concerned with the implications this may have.
> 
> 
> We want to know if being a part of OSGeo implies compliance with export
> laws of US government, and among them the prohibition of being used in
> the list of banned countries, present or future, that the USA government
> declares.
> 
> Greetings.

Luis,

My take is that a project being an OSGeo project obligates the *project*
to comply with the US rules not to export to a banned nation.  However,
it does not obligate individuals or other organizations not to export
to these banned nations, assuming there is no other constraint on those
individuals or organizations.

I would add, it isn't clear to me how hard we are expected to work to
prevent exports to banned nations.  It may be sufficient for our terms of
service on our download site to indicate that banned nations are not allowed
to download our materials directly.  It isn't clear we need to try and deploy
some sort of software verification (as code.google.com has done).

So, for instance, the foundation can't prevent a Spanish mirror not officially
a part of the project from distributing to Cuba.

It is very radical, but I would actually contemplate OSGeo reincorporating
in switzerland or as a "UN based corporation" if this becomes more of a 
problem.  However, for now I suggest we not panic.  There is very little
practical impact at this time.

Interestingly we had an interesting talk on Cloud Computing at our Ottawa
"bootcamp" event this week and there was substantial discussion at the end
about the implications of many organizations making themselves dependent
on cloud computing architectures from Amazon, Google, IBM, Sun, etc that are
ultimately subject to US law because the companies are US companies.

There is clearly significant "push back" from the world about so much
key infrastructure being subject to the whims of US law, even here in
relatively complacent Canada.

Best regards,
-
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org