US Government Enforcing Export Restrictions on SourceForge Downloads

[Thorin]

I went to download Notepad++, an excellent free, open source piece of software that I use instead of Notepad.  I checked out their News section and found out that the USA is now trying to impose it's export restrictions list on SourceForge, et al, simply because the SourceForge servers are phsyically located in the US.  The developers of Notepad++ decided to work around that by also offering their binaries for download from a French server.  Still, the whole point of FOSS is that the government doesn't control it, right?

http://notepad-plus-plus.org/content/release57-outside-the-USA

[Lazybones]

No the point of FOSS is that it is free and you have the source, it still has to follow export laws. This is why you can't get some projects in compiled form with certain security features compiled in. This however is rarely a problem between the US and Canada.

[Tom]

No the point of FOSS is that it is free and you have the source, it still has to follow export laws. This is why you can't get some projects in compiled form with certain security features compiled in. This however is rarely a problem between the US and Canada.

Its all up to how the site wants to implement the restriction. They could either say "noone outside of the US can download" or do some kind of reverse geo ip lookup shenanigans to figure out where the person is and conditionally allow them if they are in countries they can export the software to... Of course if someone wants to get around that problem they can easily...

[Mr. Analog]

TOR