On January 25th, SourceForge.net published a post on their official blog explaining that they were denying SourceForge services and site access to users residing in countries on the United States Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanction list, including Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria. Since 2003, the SourceForge.net Terms and Conditions of Use have prohibited people from those countries from accessing their website but they only began enforcing the condition a week before posting the blog entry.

Part of their justification reads: “Our need to follow those laws supersedes any wishes we might have to make our community as inclusive as possible. The possible penalties for violating these restrictions include fines and imprisonment. Other hosting companies based in the US have similar legal and technical restrictions in place.”

Although, many users have posted comments criticizing SourceForge’s decision. Some, such as afsharm, who has contributed to projects hosted on SourceForge and can no longer access his work now: “I am an Iranian (an innocent one) and I am not responsible for what ever my government is doing. As nawwark mentioned I’ve sometimes have contributions in SF.NET projects, so why you are denying me from my own works? It’s against freedom and against FOSS.”

Others, like yemeth, could not understand how a project based in another country can be considered a US product: “I seriously can’t understand this. I’m Spanish, and my technology isn’t northamerican. It has nothing to do with the United States except that is hosted here. I can’t understand why said government has anything to say about my will to share my code with EVERYONE. I have no personal embargo against Cuba, nor does my country.”

And there were those, like pmarkiewicz, who pointed out the easier solution: “Folks, if you visit http://www.torproject.org and install tor, then SourceForge can not determine your country of origin. If you happen to traverse through an exit node that is not in an ‘axis of evil’ country, then there is no reason you would be denied that code. Senator Clinton even endorsed efforts to provide these tools to dissenters.”

The comment makes reference to Secretary of State Clinton’s request to Twitter to postpone a planned maintenance shutdown during the election protests in Iran, so that Iranian users could access and use the website (seemingly putting Twitter at legal risk, following the logic used by SourceForge). At the time, she said: “And it is the case that one of the means of expression, the use of Twitter is a very important one, not only to the Iranian people but now increasingly to people around the world, and most particularly to young people.”

Two weeks later, SourceForge posted another entry on their blog, announcing a change in their decision. Now, they have removed the block and added a feature that allows project owners to ban access to the sanctioned countries:

Beginning now, every project admin can click on Develop -> Project Admin -> Project Settings to find a new section called Export Control. By default, we’ve ticked the more restrictive setting. If you conclude that your project is *not* subject to export regulations, or any other related prohibitions, you may now tick the other check mark and click Update. After that, all users will be able to download your project files as they did before last month’s change.

While this was a positive change in the eyes of some, there are still many unanswered questions from SF users, especially those from outside of the US. They don’t understand the US laws and are not sure if they will be in some kind of trouble by choosing to freely distribute their software.

To be fair, SourceForge.net is not the only web service to block users from the sanctioned countries. NXS News reported on this before when it was noticed that Google was blocking access to users based on the country they were surfing from. The consensus being floated around the FOSS community is to start choosing hosts outside the US for their projects, where restrictions on internet use are not so strict. A good option would be Launchpad.net in the UK, used by MySQL and Ubuntu. Either way, the US Government’s arguments about standing up for freedom (remember, “they hate us for our freedom”) is certainly diluted by their own efforts to restrict the individual freedom of people to freely use the internet, regardless of where in the world they happen to be when using it.

As mentioned before on this news site (US firewall exposed by bloggers from countries like Cuba or Syria), the embargo laws in the United States have a direct impact on information technology development in the affected countries. Now, a blog from Cuba has reported that Google Wave is blocked for Cuban internet users.

The article (Spanish only) goes even deeper and itemizes other examples of how the USA embargo affects the IT development in Cuba. Here is a translation of some of the cases:

• An English travel agent, Steve Marshall, lives in Spain and sells travel packages to tropical destinations, including Cuba. In October 2007, about 80 of their web sites surprisingly stopped working, as a result of an action by the U.S. Government. The Treasury Department stated that eNom Company had not acted in accordance with the law, as the agency helped Americans evade restrictions on traveling to Cuba and was “generating resources used by the Cuban regime.” Among the domain names that were shut down include www.cuba-hemingway.com (a site about literature), www.cuba-havanacity.com on Cuban history and culture and other support services for tourists from Italy and France, such as www.ciaocuba.com and www.bonjourcuba.com.
• The Institute of Scientific and Technological Information (IDICT) was affected significantly, when it was denied access to the Database Premier Academy with eBooks from Taylor & Francis Publishing. It was launched in 1996 as a central database for researchers in the fields of science, technology and medicine.
• In 2008, access to new versions of the database engine free software used all around the world, MySQL, remained limited, as also happens with Java, after they were purchased by the US corporation Sun Microsystems.

Carlos Martínez, the author of the article, also lists some websites that express the blockade against Cuba and other countries between them. The most famous ones include: Cisco Systems, Oracle Technology Network, Telefónica Spain and the Total Bank, an online banking and payment services, banking and business credit cards company.

The good side of it, according to Carlos, is that the Cuban users will have to look for alternatives to Microsoft Messenger and Google Wave tools in the free software communities. But by doing so, the users will gain more security, privacy and software freedom. He says:

Technically, although Cuba is living these prohibitions as a disadvantage compared with other Internet users, this blockade will force the Cubans to use messaging services libres (i.e. Jabber), giving them more security and privacy.

NovaTux is the first open source video game to be released by Cuba’s vibrant free software community. The work was done by students of UCI, one of the most important computer science universities in Cuba, which also launched Nova, the first GNU/Linux distribution from the country.

The video game was developed using only Blender and GIMP and is designed for kids between the ages of 9 and 14 years. NovaTux is a phase game, where each player passes through different worlds after completing specific objectives, all of which are designed to teach the main concepts of free software as well as how to use the Nova GNU/Linux distribution. So, while Cuban teens and pre-teens are learning how to use Unix with a fun and visually-compelling video game, US teens and pre-teens are dodging diet pill pop-up ads on their school’s website and squandering their limited technology resources on software licenses.

Cuban programmers have been contributing for a while already to the Blender free software project, a 3D animation and content creation application suite with incredible functionality and possibilities. Cuban programmer Raul Fernandez Hernandez (Farsthary) works on true volumetrics for Blender. He keeps a blog with updates on his project but he also supports the Cuban Blender community and writes about his visits to the UCI Campus and their community-building efforts.

ALBA (Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas) is an organization designed to foster co-operation amongst Latin American countries and currently includes Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Cuba, Honduras and Dominica as member states.

In response to the controversial Organization of American States, which is viewed by many in Latin America as a way for the United States to apply economic and political pressure against countries in the region, ALBA has a released a statement which strongly condemns the recent OAS summit and pronounces their world view.

In their statement, which covers a broad range of issues, ALBA calls for universal access to telecommunications (phone, internet, etc) as a human right in a world which increasingly relies on networked communications:

Basic education, health, water, energy and telecommunications services should be declared human rights and cannot be subject to private deal or marketed by the World Trade Organization. These services are and should be essentially public utilities of universal access.

This ideal has driven many of the policies of Latin American countries inside and outside of ALBA, including Brazil.

FLISOL - The Latin American Festivals of Installation of Free Software are install fests organized by the regional free software communities since 2005. The event is the largest distributed free software event in the world — last year, there were install fests in more than 200 cities in 18 countries in Latin America.

The goal of the event is to promote the use of free software, so the general public can know its philosophy, install GNU/Linux on their computers, learn about the applications and understand how they are developed by volunteer communities. Every install fest is free of charge in every location and they also include lectures, presentations and workshops.

Check out the list of countries hosting the event: