[Board] OSGeo and Russia / Belarus

[Even Rouault]

Hi

(not a board member)

Tricky subject. My position would be to stick with the obligations of 
law (an interesting question is which one(s) apply... the one of your 
country of residence, or US law for OSGeo projects?), and code of 
conduct of our projects (thinking here if a contributor would start 
harassing others based on political views). My quick browsing of 
https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/sanctions/restrictive-measures-against-russia-over-ukraine/ 
doesn't show any restriction that could affect our normal FOSS 
activities. The only related point would be if a EU based service 
provider would want to provide services to a Russian entity since there 
is a "prohibition to provide IT consultancy service", but for code & 
translation sharing not involving explicit monetary exchanges, nothing 
strikes me as banned.

Whereas our software is used for good or evil is something that could be 
debated for long (some OSS licences have tried to exclude evil use, but 
I believe that's not legally enforceable). Cartography has certainly a 
long and strong connection with military activities (which can be for 
good or evil)...

Even

Le 10/01/2024 à 12:27, Jeroen Ticheler via Board a écrit :
> Dear board,
>
> With a long war in Ukraine going on, I would like to know if we have 
> had talks in the OSGeo board or community on how we deal with 
> contributions to our software from Russia and Belarus? We have sincere 
> and great contributors that are residents of those countries on one 
> hand, and we have things like international sanctions on the other hand.
>
> In the GeoNetwork community we have active contributions on the 
> language translations from contributors we know and that we don't 
> know. Sometimes with usernames that are generic.
>
> Now I personally have both positive and negative feelings about this. 
> Negative because I dislike the idea that our software could be used 
> for bad things by a hostile government. Positive because contributions 
> coming back to the project improve things for everyone and helps 
> making the world a better place by being inclusive and friendly.
>
> As also described in this article 
> <https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/21/russian_foss_contributions_blocked/> it 
> does not help much to block Russians or Belarussians from 
> contributing; They can still use the software and _not_ share their 
> improvements with the project (a fork is easily maintained outside of 
> our repositories). So my stance at this point is not to take active 
> action. I'm very interested to know what the board thinks about the 
> topic and if other projects have had similar discussions?
>
> Thanks and greetings,
> Jeroen
>
>
> <https://www.geocat.net>
>
> Jeroen Ticheler
> E-mail: jeroen.ticheler at geocat.net
> https://www.geocat.net
>
> Veenderweg 13
> 6721 WD Bennekom
> The Netherlands
> Tel: +31318416664
>
> <#>
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Board mailing list
> Board at lists.osgeo.org
> https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/board

-- 
http://www.spatialys.com
My software is free, but my time generally not.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/board/attachments/20240110/82e41b53/attachment-0001.htm>