[Incubator] SourceForge's compliance with the US Export Restrictions Act

[Arnulf Christl]

Folks,
this is a follow up to my short report at the last board meeting wrt US
Export Restrictions and the problems that this caused for a number of
OSGeo members and officers [1]. SourceForge now decided to allow project
leaders to decide for themselves [2] whether their code falls under
Export Restricitons or not. This is a good step and follows suit with
how Apache [3] and OSGeo [4] handle this issue. Seems like we are on
track, although our own document is not approved yet, it never got to
that stage. Chris Schmidt offered to look into this issue and update the
OSGeo page accordingly.

Incubators, we might want to make the check for Export Restriction
related code a mandatory exercise for projects in incubation. One goal
would be to comply with US law - which we must - the other is to make
PSCs plan and suggest implementations of alternative access facilities
for folks from the evil axis. This might include SVN mirrors or even the
adoption of more flexible code versioning tools like git or mercurial
(just throwing around names, I am not savyy at either of them).

A short term practical solution can be the provision of proxies in
countries that do not fall under the US Export Restrictions. An official
request to the German FOSSGIS on that behalf is on its way. It is a
legal entity of its own and should be fine to either provide a proxy or
mirror or both. If you are also in a position to offer workarounds feel
free to speak up.

This also brings up the old question about what to do with existing
projects in post-graduation mode but lets leave that for another thread.

Project Leads, can you please make sure that you are up to date with
these issues and report back to these lists (or any of us off list) if
you encounter any difficulties.

Thank you.

Best regards,
Arnulf Christl

[1] http://logs.qgis.org/osgeo/%23osgeo.2010-02-04.log starting at 06:28:37
[2]
http://sourceforge.net/blog/some-good-news-sourceforge-removes-blanket-blocking/
[3] http://www.apache.org/licenses/exports/
[4] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/US_Export_Restrictions

-- 
Arnulf Christl
President OSGeo
http://www.osgeo.org