LxCenter Software and US Export Control

[Andrew Ying]

Hi,

Before anything, please check the following quote from Walter. 

Our users can tell us their clients difficulties, for which are many. 
One example is right-to-left writing from arabic and hebrew scripts. 
To them, Kloxo and HyperVM looks and feels completely alien. 

Have a look at these sites: 
http://www.haaretz.co.il 
http://www.aljazeera.net/portal 

Note how everything, including design elements (such as control 
buttons, icon position, search boxes, navigation elements) are 
inverted. Specially confusing for breadcrumb navigation you find in 
Kloxo and HyperVM. 

Like I said many times before, there's so much more to Design, 
specially Web Design for a global open source project. 

You have to consider our userbase, specially arabic speakers who 
cannot buy a commercial panel license even if they wanted to due to 
export control in the US. The crackdown has begun not too long ago and 
"ThatPanel" clients with servers in Iran, Lybia, Syria, Palestine (to 
name only a few) woke up to bricked servers due to revoked licenses. 
The choice then was to go bankrupt or rent a server in Europe or North 
America which are subject to spying as we now know. 

And here's my 50 cents =) As some of you may know, I am currently living in the United Kingdom, and I have to say I am very sensitive about these things. A good number of other foundations, like the ASF are. According to their website http://www.apache.org/licenses/exports/, the Apache HTTP Server is also classified as subject to US Export Control. My view point is basically we need to disable download from US embargoed countries. We could probably also seek classification of our software, see http://opensource.org/node/505.

And personally, I think countries like Iraq or Syria are far too dangerous. They are developing nuclear, chemical weapons, and killing much people. I wouldn't want my work to be used for such purpose (which is very possible, to be honest). I stand is that I would not develop for Arabic until we got a way to make sure these countries cannot get access to our code. Note btw, this is in the part of GNU license, "where the law prohibits" and thus should not cause a problem there. 

I need your input here because there's a problem with the user base some of us would like to serve.

Thanks,

Andrew

[Krzysztof Taraszka]

Isn't that github.com should take care about that? We store our code there...

From the other hand we are not able to control some 3rd party download servers where someone can put our code… (for example the piratebay?)

That is my 1 cent.. 

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[Andrew Ying]

Hi,

Not really... Because user downloads our completed packages from our server directly... So the act of exporting the code is both done via our server and GitHub's server. What I want to us doing what we need to do. That's it. We disable download, we list clearly that users are not expected to export our product to US embargoed countries. What the user do is their own choice, and when the US discovered that (maybe) HyperVM is used for terrorist activities, it is down to the guys which actually exported it to bear the legal consequences.

Oh btw, GitHub is itself a US company, so I believe people in Syria (or other similar countries) cannot access our codebase at GitHub.

Best,

Andrew