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Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

> "require any American person or company to receive an export license prior to engaging with PRC (People's Republic of China) entities on RISC-V technology."

How would that end up working?

I've seen situations in which exports restrictions came up, and which resulted in design or manufacturing being restructured, so that more work was shifted to be done in the restricted country. Which also meant that more know-how was developed in the restricted country. Which I don't think was the (ostensible) intended outcome. It might've had short-term benefits for some companies, though.

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What the hell does that even mean for open source? Need an export license to run a frigging GitHub project if it has anything to do with RISC-V at all? Does a compiler with a RISC-V target count? Projects with RISC-V builds?

Yes to all, technically. It won't matter usually, but technically. Weapons export controls are getting absurd that buying Chinese to get around is totally an option now.

Like, seen those silver tablet thing for screening COVID in visitors? They are ALL designed and built by Chinese companies using really good and completely unlocked Chinese thermal cameras, because, access to Western versions of such high technology could "pose threat" to the Western world and is therefore severely restricted.

And they ALL record every faces it's seen, which are often not GUI discoverable nor exportable but extractable by sshing into, because of course they do and they are.

And that is what export control schemes are doing.

If you set aside the absurdity of applying it to RISC-V for a second, yes, that is exactly what export control means. Any such regulated technology can't be exported (for a very well defined and strict definition of "exported"). Posting it on GitHub definitely counts as an export controls violation.

> more work was shifted to be done in the restricted country

Yes and it cost them more overall. People who design sanctions know well that they provide a powerful incentive to the development of indigenous alternatives in the target country. The calculus is that on balance, it is more desirable to force the target country to waste their resources on catching up (or on circumventing sanctions). The point is to make things more expensive.

In practice, how much is it this calculus, and how much is it lobbyists for companies with fairly short-term commercial goals?

In the country applying export sanctions, what companies draw short-term benefits? Usually most commercial actors would rather be able to export anything anywhere.

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