According to SourceForge’s Lee Schlesinger, the company has no way of knowing which projects should or shouldn’t trigger a block. So it will leave that up to the individuals running the project:

Read the rest on OStatic

The long and short of it seems to be that SourceForge is filtering access to downloads. Requests from Syria, Sudan, Iran, North Korea and Cuba are apparently being blocked and denied access to downloads.

ArabCrunch, a site that covers tech in the Arab world, conflates the issue into a debate about whether FLOSS is really “free,” and calls for migration of hosting projects to “‘less free’ countries with no export control regulations.”

If there’s a perfect country in which to do business, I’m all ears. But, the export controls on software in the United States are ridiculous, and a royal pain for corporate participants in open source. In 2009, I spent some time working with Novell’s legal department on the issue of accepting contributions from “banned” states, and whether that would put the project or company in legal jeopardy. I also put out feelers to project leads from other distros and FLOSS projects.

The consensus is there’s no consensus on what should be done from a legal perspective. The laws are not entirely clear, and projects vary greatly in their concern about enforcement of the export restrictions. Some projects happily accept contributions from community members living in “banned states,” and others have been advised by their legal departments that they need to have a policy against accepting contributions from those contributors. However, there is universal agreement that the policies are ridiculous and ineffective, not to mention discouraging for FLOSS projects that welcome any and all well-meaning contributors.

Novell’s legal department decided that openSUSE could accept contributions from sanctioned states, so long as there was no “consideration” for the contributions. That is, contributors who are sending patches and whatnot, but not receiving any gifts or renumeration for their contributions.

Other companies have decided that they won’t accept contributions. But very few have taken the step of banning access to downloads outright. SourceForge seems to be taking an overly conservative approach at this point, and that could hurt the site in the long run if projects choose to go with a hosting provider with less restricive policies.

I hope SourceForge will revise its policies here. Even better if the U.S. would revise its policies, but this kind of political change takes a very long time.