Freeze! Don’t move. What are those? Fedora! Linux! Ah. How do you get them? Did you download it? Where did you find them?… what a nightmare. 🙁
I proudly announce that Iranian Fedora community is illegal. YES, we can’t use Fedora at all. We are not able to take part as members of this global community. All this happen because of the U.S laws.
I’ve lost all my concentration. I don’t know what should I do? It’s a very hard situation. I don’t know what should I write here? I’m using Fedora 10 in my box, do I break the U.S laws 🙂 ?
Would you show your support at least by adding a few words at the comments or talk to your lawmakers?
Thanks in advance for your support
[FedoraPlanet] Mostafa Daneshvar: We are illegal:
Freeze! Don’t move. What are those? Fedora!.. http://tinyurl.com/bgksnw
> All this happen because of the U.S laws.
Just download it from russian mirrors 🙂
http://mirror.yandex.ru
> I’m using Fedora 10 in my box, do I break the U.S laws
Who cares.
I’m not completely sure I get this. Are you referring to the U.S. export laws?
yes, exactly
Certainly a very unfortunate situation but sadly I don’t see a easy way out of this. Continue using Fedora. The community will support you
So much for open source… One also has to own a telephone to be a registered contributor.
It sucks to be excluded for one reason or another. I wish that Fedora was based in a neutral environment.
It’s certainly not illegal for you to use Fedora. It’s illegal for Fedora (Red Hat?) to offer Fedora to Iranians, but it’s their problem, not yours.
Are we Iranians accepting such terms on the EULA of every Fedora installation?
But that must be GPL license, right? So what’s that if it says some users are not allowed to use it?
If i understant it correctly, Fedora is not allowed by the US export laws to export it to you, but laws in other counties allow it, so you can easily downlaod from other mirrors.
It may be troublesome if your local law would forbid importing from US (but then the same thing aboutdownlaoding from another country may apply)
Now that’s the real problem: the Fedora project, as an entity based on USA, is not allowed to receive contributions from you…. I remember a similat situation on another FOSS project and a contributor from North Korea. IIRC, that was solved with him pretending he contribute as a member of the South Korea team.
Mostafa: When it comes to U.S. laws, I guess it’s not that easy to convince a “lawmaker”. See the problems with software patents. My bets are your politicans could do more about this 😉
It seems to me like import/export laws really don’t play well with Free Software. If I understand that correctly, Fedora (and Red Hat, and everyone else) can’t use any code contributed to any of its upstreams from embargoed countries. There already almost certailnly is such code, and it probably can’t be found out anyways.
All fedorans are equal. The problem is that some countries don’t want international boundaries to be crossed, etc, etc.
Like I said today after the board meeting. This isn’t a fedora policy we’re CHOOSING to enforce it’s a US gov’t law we HAVE to follow. If you have problems with the law remember there are 2 groups that can fix it for Iran:
۱.the us state department
۲. the iranian gov’t
I’ll be writing my representative to see if I can get the rules changed on the US gov’t side of things. That is, unfortunately, the best I can do.
Seth : it is time to CHANGE. You can call the us state department and show your dissatisfaction
Yes, that’s too unfortunate. And I have almost no hope that it will be fixed soon. We (Iranians) are under heavy sanctions, and it is raising, so that’ll become worse now…
Anyway, we’ll continue illegally!
🙂
One of the questions raised were: “Is there a more neutral place than US?”
I tried searching a bit about the EU export laws but not much luck.
@Dimitris
maybe Asia , India
Hedayat: I’m wondering if it’s illegal for you as well? I mean, od you also have export limitations against U.S. Would you be persecuted by your government if you traded with an
U.S. based company?
Lubomir:
as far as I know we can trade with any U.S citizen or company. As I mentioned in the post these happens because of U.S laws not Iranian.
Lubomir: No, we don’t have such limitations. I meant that its illegal things with regard to US laws
😛