Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmillikin | Hacker News Reader

SourceForge doesn't have much choice in this, unless they're willing to violate US law.

For what it's worth, SourceForge allows projects to determine whether their downloads are subject to export laws, and to disable the blocks[1]. Support for this was added in early February, several months before the notepad-plus-plus.org domain was registered. There's no technical or legal reason why N++ had to move off SourceForge; they're simply throwing a hissy fit.

[1] http://sourceforge.net/blog/some-good-news-SourceForge-remov...

View on HN

> There's no technical or legal reason why N++ had to move off SourceForge; they're simply throwing a hissy fit.

What's wrong with moving off the server out of principle? While I'm American, I can't fault these guys if they suddenly felt less secure about the hosting of their work by a US company, especially if it's due to political reasons they'd have no recourse over if at some future point they risk being targeted (even unintentionally) by a future policy.

Acting on "out of principle" could be a quicker way to deep-six your business adventure.

Making political statements with your open source project releases leaves your project, and now political views, completely open to the community.

That is what they wanted, and that is what they will get - good or bad.

I'm curious, has siding with open-source ever actually hurt anyone? It's like saying I believe everyone should be able to use my product, and I'm going to work hard to make that possible...

It's also possible contributors who have been blocked from other projects would think this is one is blocked as well and just avoid all SourceForge projects.

"What's wrong with moving off the server out of principle?"

Nothing, but if that were the case, why move to France? It would be more appropriate to chose a country less infamous for internet censorship, such as Sweden, Norway, or the Czech Republic.

More appropriate for those who know what is the best option in terms of information share freedom. Maybe notepad++ does not know these countries are the best choices, currently, to host what they want.

Regardless, it does not look they went to the best possible option, but instead they went for something that is at least better than their current options. French hosting, in their terms, is better than Sourceforge. It's a step into something direction...

This direction is what is really important. If, they ever become aware of France limitations (and it would be easy to make them aware) they can improve their offerings.

Agreed. As soon as this setting became available, I simply went it and set it to "does not incorporate ... encryption of any kind" for all of my projects that do not use encryption.

Wait-a-minute. Exportation of cryptography technology is still limited in the US? This law is long obsolete, why does it still apply?

IIRC exporting encryption to the short list of disallowed countries is still illegal.

Note however than any project that involves encryption at all - including just linking to encryption libraries or using OS-provided functions - cannot tick that box.

This doesn't seem to apply to Notepad++, but these days it applies to a great deal of apps. Any that can make SSL connections, for a start.

I highly doubt anybody is going to check if a project that has that box checked actually incorporate encryption.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com