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Written by John Kennedy
Just days after American Secretary of State Hillary Clinton‘s speech on Internet freedom, open source source code repository SourceForge.net blocked access to IP addresses originating in Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan and Syria.
SourceForge justifies the move saying they are only following American law. Which is more or less the same argument Chinese government spokespeople make when questioned about their country’s Internet censorship.
SourceForge has been blocked by China before. Hearing word of this new Great Firewall of America left some Chinese coders wondering if they might now start getting blocked from the other end and what can be done about it.
At CNBeta on the day the news broke, ugmbbc wrote:
Over at geek community Solidot, free-as-in-freedom notes that this move by SourceForge follows earlier restrictions on users from these five countries, allowing them to browse the site and download source code, but barring them from contributing any. Comments there include:
erlv at his technical blog LingCC looks at the implications of politics encroaching upon the open source movement:
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This post was previously published on globalvoices.org and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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