hi, plz add #gentoo-ir to Regional Support Channels, it' for Iran ( ایران ) country. tnx Reproducible: Always
Josh, Can you take care of this eventually? Thanks.
Waitasec. Iran? Aren't they part of the software export ban that sf.net got in trouble for, and they had to change their access restrictions because of it? Does that in any way affect our official support channels or anything? I'd rather be excessively cautious than hasty.
(In reply to comment #2) > Waitasec. Iran? Aren't they part of the software export ban that sf.net got in > trouble for, and they had to change their access restrictions because of it? > > Does that in any way affect our official support channels or anything? I'd > rather be excessively cautious than hasty. > yes, but sf did it for political reason though I don't know what's the relation between politic & use of *open source" softwares & I also don't know why it should affect on anything that is your business while politic is not your business! I really think the philosophy of free software has lost by politic!
(In reply to comment #3) > yes, but sf did it for political reason though I don't know what's the relation > between politic & use of *open source" softwares & I also don't know why it > should affect on anything that is your business while politic is not your > business! I really think the philosophy of free software has lost by politic! That's totally irrelevant. It wasn't politics. SourceForge did it because they had to comply with US law, since their servers are located in the US. Gentoo may have to comply with the law for similar reasons. CCing the Trustees on this one.
Updating the summary to actually reflect this bug. I say we add the channel, but I'll wait for the other trustees to chime in. My reasoning being adding the channel is that simply talking to people in Iran isn't against the law. You may get many government agencies listening to your call, but it isn't illegal.
As for the EAR garbage: 1. There's no way we can prohibit all our mirrors from exchanging data with Iran (Turkey for example, is actually allied with Iran IIRC). They can just get the tree data from one of those mirrors, and avoid US mirrors for distfiles, and in that regard they have complied with the export laws. 2. Part of the software export laws have already been relaxed: http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/58290 3. Looking at kernel.org, they just have a disclaimer on their front page, and don't do ANY restrictions at all.
(In reply to comment #5) (In reply to comment #6) That sounds reasonable to me, so I'm willing to make the change, but I want to hear what our trustees say first, rather than plunging ahead.
<hat type="trustees"> Per the trustees meeting of 2010/03/21, we could not come to a consensus of a direct action to take for allowing or denying it. We're going to ask for our legal counsel if there is any problem with it, given the TSU exemption to the FAR restrictions, as well as Facebook supporting Iranian users. If they say it's ok, we'll add it. If they say it's NOT ok, we would like to consider adding Farsi and Arabic channels (language oriented vs. region oriented) instead, to mitigate the impact. </hat>
quantumsummers: did we get any response on this? If nothing yet, I say we go ahead in the meantime.
#gentoo-ir added now per trustees decision 2012/02/19. Description with it is in English, as I can't find how to do BiDi text in our XML.