[OSGeoJapan-discuss] U.S. Trade Embargo and OSGeo

[Jeff McKenna]

Hello everyone,

Last night at the OSGeo Board meeting an interesting topic was 
discussed: very recently (25 January?) the U.S. Obama administration has 
put pressure on Sourceforge.net to enforce their trade embargo on its 
users[1] - meaning users in Cuba, North Korea, Sudan, Syria and Iran are 
no longer able to download files from Sourceforge (their IPs are now 
blocked).  Sourceforge has stated[2] that it is registered in the U.S. 
and therefore has no choice but to follow U.S. laws[2], even though they 
disagree with it.

OSGeo is also registered in the U.S. so there a lot of concern about 
this issue.  OSGeo does have to follow U.S. export restrictions, and its 
statement is visible here[3]

Arnulf Christl (OSGeo President) believes that the embargo can only be 
applied to 'collaborative work' - and since all OSGeo projects are 
collaborative, this new enforcement should not apply to OSGeo users. 
However the OSGeo Board will now look into this (we may have to modify 
the 'US_Export_Restrictions' wiki page to clarify how the embargo does 
not affect our works).

I thought the Japan community should know about this recent issue.

[1] http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=5698
[2] 
http://sourceforge.net/blog/clarifying-sourceforgenets-denial-of-site-access-for-certain-persons-in-accordance-with-us-law/
[3] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/US_Export_Restrictions

-jeff