What Happens When The US Government Tries To Take On The Open Source Community?

from the maybe-we-are-about-to-find-out dept

Last year, Microsoft bought the popular code repository GitHub. As Techdirt wrote at the time, many people were concerned by this takeover of a key open source resource by a corporate giant that has frequently proved unfriendly to free software. In the event, nothing worrying has happened -- until this:

GitHub this week told Anatoliy Kashkin, a 21-year-old Russian citizen who lives in Crimea, that it had "restricted" his GitHub account "due to US trade controls".

As the ZDNet article explains, a user in Iran encountered the same problems. Naturally, many people saw this as precisely the kind of danger they were worried about when Microsoft bought GitHub. The division's CEO, Nat Friedman, used Twitter to explain what exactly was happening, and why:

To comply with US sanctions, we unfortunately had to implement new restrictions on private repos and paid accounts in Iran, Syria, and Crimea.

Public repos remain available to developers everywhere -- open source repos are NOT affected.

He went on to note:

The restrictions are based on place of residence and location, not on nationality or heritage. If someone was flagged in error, they can fill out a form to get the restrictions lifted on their account within hours.

Users with restricted private repos can also choose to make them public. Our understanding of the law does not give us the option to give anyone advance notice of restrictions.

We're not doing this because we want to; we're doing it because we have to. GitHub will continue to advocate vigorously with governments around the world for policies that protect software developers and the global open source community.

The most important aspect of this latest move by GitHub is that open source projects are unaffected, and that even those who are hit by the bans can get around them by moving from private to public repositories. Friedman rightly points out that as a company based in the US, GitHub doesn't have much scope for ignoring US laws.

However, this incident does raise some important questions. For example, what happens if the US government decides that it wants to prevent programmers in certain countries from accessing open source repositories on GitHub as well? That would go against a fundamental aspect of free software, which is that it can be used by anyone, for anything -- including for bad stuff.

This question has already come up before, when President Trump issued the executive order "Securing the Information and Communications Technology and Services Supply Chain", a thinly-disguised attack on the Chinese telecoms giant Huawei. As a result of the order, Google blocked Huawei's access to updates of Android. Some Chinese users were worried they were about to lose access to GitHub, which is just as crucial for software development in China as elsewhere. GitHub said that wasn't the case, but it's not hard to imagine the Trump administration putting pressure on GitHub's owner, Microsoft, to toe the line at some point in the future.

More generally, the worry has to be that the US government will attempt to dictate to all global free software projects who may and may not use their code. That's something that the well-known open source and open hardware hacker Bunnie Huang has written about at length, in a blog post entitled "Open Source Could Be a Casualty of the Trade War". It's well-worth reading and pondering, because the relatively minor recent problems with GitHub could turn out to be a prelude to a far more serious clash of cultures.

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Filed Under: crimea, doj, open source software, sanctions, trade wars, us sanctions
Companies: github, microsoft

8 Years Later: Saeed Malekpour Is Still In An Iranian Prison Simply For Writing Open Source Software

from the free-saeed dept

We talk a great deal on Techdirt about the importance of free speech alongside the importance of not damning technological tools for the way third parties choose to use them. These matters can delve into minutiae in the American and Western forms of this conversation, with discussions about Section 230 protections and the like. But in other parts of the world, the conversation is much different.

Back in 2008 in Iran, for instance, the government there elected to imprison a Canadian resident of Iranian lineage, initially under a death sentence, but later commuting that sentence to mere life imprisonment. His crime? Saeed Malekpour created some open source code for sharing photos on the internet that others within Iran used for pornography.

Saeed was living in Canada as a permanent resident before he embarked on what was supposed to be a short trip to Iran in October 2008. While visiting his father in Iran, authorities decided to target Malekpour for his open source software program that others had used to upload pornographic images to the Internet.

His story is one of many that exemplify the fear Iranian authorities use to control the nation's Internet space. Saeed was charged with threatening the nation's Islamic ideals and national security via propaganda against the system, but evidence against him was scant. He spent time in solitary confinement and gave forced confessions — widely publicized on national television in 2010 — that were extracted under torture, including beatings, electrocution and threats of rape.

This follows the Iranian tradition of tamping down on the freedom and outcry of its own citizens by making examples of others. The guilt or innocence of these others is hardly relevant to this practice. In the case of Saeed, the target was the sharing tool, not the porn that others might have used it for. It's no mistake that Saeed's arrest came directly in the wake of the Iranian government's 2008 legislation blitz aimed at curtailing a free and open internet presence within its borders.

While groups like the EFF have been calling for his release for some time now, they are also currently running a campaign to help him through a letter-writing blitz targeted at Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. On Tuesday, the anniversary of Saeed's arrest, #FreeSaeed made its way around Twitter.

For those of us who believe in not only a free and open internet, but in the freedom to create and evolve digital tools -- without having to fear being targeted for the actions of others, particularly for benign actions like pornography -- it's a cause worth joining.

Filed Under: free speech, iran, open internet, open source software, photo posting, saeed malekpour

DailyDirt: Open Source Software In 2016

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Open source software (OSS) has been around for several decades now, and it serves as the foundation for many gadgets and online services that consumers use regularly. Google, Facebook, Twitter -- even some Apple devices -- use open source software. There may even be a growing trend to use open source, but proprietary software is never totally going away, folks.

• Open source software gained a lot of ground in 2015 -- with several large tech companies making commitments to embrace open source. Sure, it's all self-serving to attract developers and keep users locked into an ecosystem of services and/or hardware, but it's still nice to see more open source projects, right? [url]
• Microsoft open sourced .NET in 2014, and now it's following the trend of open sourcing machine learning tools by making the Microsoft Distributed Machine Learning Toolkit available to anyone who wants to work with it. We've seen Google, Facebook, OpenAI and others doing similar things, and Apple looks like it might be one of the last holdouts for releasing open source AI tools (but it's probably just keeping its strategy of building proprietary software on top of open source projects, such as IBM does, too). [url]
• In the last five years, more dollars have been invested in open source software companies than in the previous five years -- by about ten times. Obviously, this factoid also correlates with rising tech bubble, but it could also mean some notable open source IPOs are on the way that could encourage even more open source business models. [url]

If you've been thinking about learning how to code, take a look at our Daily Deals for a collection of online courses to help you program and/or master some professional skills.

Filed Under: .net, distributed machine learning toolkit, dmlt, open source software, oss, software
Companies: apple, facebook, google, ibm, microsoft, openai

German Court Says CEO Of Open Source Company Liable For 'Illegal' Functions Submitted By Community

from the unclear-on-the-concept dept

We just had an article mentioning that Germany has a ridiculous (and dangerously anti-innovation) view towards secondary liability, in which the country's courts often default to making third parties liable for actions they did not do. We noted that a court in Stuttgart had decided that the Wikimedia Foundation could be held liable for content submitted by a community member on the site, though only after the organization was alerted to the content (which still has significant problems for what are hopefully obvious reasons).

And now it appears that a court in Hamburg has gone even further, saying that the CEO of Appwork, a company that offers the open source JDownloader software can be held personally liable for "illegal" code that was submitted by an anonymous programmer, and which automatically showed up in the nightly build of the JDownloader 2 beta (not the officially released product). The code in question allowed JDownloader to record certain copy-protect streams, violating an anti-circumvention law. Appwork made it clear that it had no idea the functionality had been added, that anyone can contribute to the source and that it goes out automatically in the nightly build of the beta. Furthermore, the company carefully reviews the code and features of any official releases, and would have blocked such functionality from appearing in that code. All of this would lead most people to realize that it's crazy to blame Appwork (and even crazier to blame the CEO).

But not the court, apparently. The court relied on the bizarre argument that since Appwork offers the product commercially, that makes it automatically liable for anything that appears in the open source beta. Basically, such a ruling will make it exceptionally difficult to have a commercial open source product in Germany, since you could face liability if someone contributes code that somehow is considered illegal. If these kinds of secondary liability rulings keep cropping up in Germany, the hot startup scene in Berlin may realize that the country's outdated laws make it quite difficult to do anything all that innovative, especially if it involves any contributions from outside the company. Given how important community contributions are these days, that cuts off a huge amount of internet innovation from the German market.

Filed Under: germany, hamburg, jdownloader, jdownloader2, open source software, secondary liability
Companies: appwork

Dear Australia: Software Knows No Borders

from the yeah,-that'll-work dept

Ross Lazarus points us to the rather surprising news that an increasing number of Sun MySQL employees have been barred from entering Australia on short-term business visas, due to the worry that they'll somehow "compete" with local businesses. There certainly may be more to this story, but on the face of it, it seems pretty ridiculous. Preventing employees of a certain company from entering your country may (barely) have made sense in the past and in some specific industries, but with software on today's internet, it's positively laughable. Somehow I doubt that the "local" Australian database developer community is resting easier thanks to their country's border patrol safely keeping MySQL employees abroad.

Filed Under: australia, customs, mysql, open source software
Companies: sun

MBAs Being Taught To Fight Open Source By Offering Closed Source Alternatives?

from the get-a-refund dept

The Slashdot crowd is reasonably up in arms of a paper jointly written by a Harvard Business School professor and a Stanford Graduate School of Business professor on ways to compete with open source competitors. Amusingly, nowhere in the paper does it suggest that one of those strategies might be to go open source yourself, embracing the actual benefits of openness and infinite goods, and focusing on better business models involving scarce goods. In fact, it doesn't even seem like the paper recognizes the rather large businesses created around open source software, with the totally false implication being that open source isn't a business, but a hobby. Frankly, the whole thing gives MBAs a bad name, by suggesting that they're not being taught to actually understand how open source can be used within a business model. That's unfortunate, because it's simply not true -- at least at some schools. Much of my own journey down the path in exploring the economics of infinite goods started thanks to my own MBA professor Alan McAdams at Cornell, who was teaching how important open source models were to the success of the internet and businesses back when I first took his class in 1996 or 1997.

Filed Under: competition, cornell, harvard, mbas, open source software, stanford