On Fri, Jul 26, 2019 at 06:08:40PM +0200, Anders Andersson wrote: > > You seem to contradict yourself a bit here - at least if you argue for > GitHub's stance. As you yourself point out, Debian went around the > law. Because of that, no user was affected even while the law was > still relevant. GitHub does not offer a workaround (yet). If they > lobby for that - great. In the meantime, their choice of location seem > to limit their ability to offer the same freedom to everyone. > I'm not arguing for or against GitHub's stance, nor is there a contradiction.
In both cases, the organizations in question respected the law and sought to effect change in the interest of promoting freedom. Your statement that "no user was affected" is not accurate. Every user was affected, both within and without the US, as a result of the added complexity of an additional package source. That also incurred an additional maintenance burden on the project. Perhaps there is more that GitHub could do, like locating hosting facilities in other parts of the world and then offering services to the sanctioned markets via a mechanism that would not violate US law. I would encourage anyone who feels strongly about it to either go to work for GitHub and effect such a change, or to create a technically equivalent or superior competitor that is not subject to the same legal jurisdiction. However, as I write the above, it dawns on me that Reco's initial post did not offer any alternative service providers or suggestions for improving the situation and so the objective might just be to complain or to incite some form of argument. Regards, -Roberto -- Roberto C. Sánchez
