On Thu, 18 Aug 2022 17:09:30 +0930, Simon Lees wrote:
If I, as an author of code, live in the US, the embargoed countries for the US are still places I can't legally export things to, but if that code that I created is OSS and is distributed through a server in China by someone who "forked" the code by making a copy and not changing it, I'm not distributing the code to North Korea, but my code is ending up in North Korea nonetheless.
What laws were broken in that instance?
This is a fundamental reason why export control laws related to open source code have fundamentally changed in the last year or so see https://www.linuxfoundation.org/tools/understanding-us-export-controls- with-open-source-projects/ if your interested.
This is good info, I'll take a look at it later in the day (still pretty early in the morning here :) )
Yeah, that makes sense, and there is export-restricted code in the open- source world. But tracing it is pretty difficult to do outside of a specific distro. As a German company, is SUSE required to follow US Export restrictions? (Probably yes for distribution that takes place from the US; say it's hosted on a server in China, though....The law there is different, and someone from, say, North Korea, could legally obtain it from that server without any such restriction - as far as I know).
It always gets more complicated as SUSE has legal entities in every country where it has direct employees (and probably also some others).
Absolutely. But I think the point as well that I'm making is that SUSE doesn't own a lot of the code ("most" actually) that they're distributing, either as part of SLE or as part of openSUSE. So if I were based in China and contributing code to a project that openSUSE provides in its distro, my code could be legally be distributed (under Chinese law) to North Korea, but not as part of openSUSE. Or maybe an even more relatable situation - if I am based in Canada, there's no embargo in Canada against Iran. So there's a question of code ownership that seems to me to be relevant here. -- Jim Henderson Please keep on-topic replies on the list so everyone benefits