So how exactly do you interpret the latter part ("Congress may by general Laws prescribe...")?

I believe you are incorrectly referring to Ron Paul's position on the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA):

Here's the text of Article IV, Section 1:

Feel free to elaborate your position if you think I misread what you were saying.

In that video Harry Reid isn't talking about riders, he's talking about the practice of earmarking or congressional directive spending.

Riders are awful and should be banned through a constitutional amendment, earmarks however are an entirely different matter as the person you replied to pointed out.

I can think of much more despicable examples of war profiteering that most certainly don't involve game publishers...

I'm much more troubled by how much the general population (which mostly consists out of non-gamers) couldn't give a shit less about anything that is happening in Afghanistan. If you want to complain about something desensitizing folks look no further than the constant barrage of reality television shows.

Are we still allowed to call people Grammar Nazis or has that too been deemed too politically incorrect?

While you do make a valid point (be careful about what you run) and I personally can't actually understand the code provided I have to say that sometimes you have to put a little trust in others. Do you inspect and thoroughly understand every update that your distro suggests? Considering the fact the tool is distributed through Ksplice's website, you have to be seriously paranoid to think Ksplice would even dare to do anything like that.

A few years ago I was working for a consultancy agency where the employees were on the road a lot and I set-up a local private StatusNet installation (then Laconica) to enable them to more easily share "stuff" with each other (mostly sharing news and general thoughts). It was and still is a big hit. So, I can certainly believe people would be using Chatter.

You're the editor, you should feel free to edit the story. :-)

Hi, I'm one of members of the RabbitVCS team, the project commended in the linked article by Abdulrahman Idlbi for our decision to "work around" the export ban, though I am not entirely sure if we deserve all of the credit given. I do not speak for the rest of the team, though I do believe they share the same opinion on this matter as I do.

Early September 2009 Bashir Al-Noimi informed us of the problems he had in trying to access our project website at Google Code (and by extension, our software) from his home country of Syria. At the time, the renaming of the project from NautilusSvn to RabbitVCS (and the migration that would follow) was already on our agenda, Bashir's issues only accelerated the process. You can read about Bashir's experience at his blog (translation).

Over the course of several weeks we worked out the various possibilities on our wiki. In the end we choose to take the path of least resistance and decided to keep most parts of our infrastructure at Google, apart from the export restrictions with which we disagreed, we were (and still are) satisfied with the service itself.

As a result we still use Google Code for our repository (Subversion), issue tracker, code reviewing tool and file hosting and Google Groups for our mailing lists. Though we also distribute RabbitVCS through our Personal Package Archive (PPA) at Launchpad (which we use for our translation efforts as well). So it should be possible for people from countries affected by export regulations to at least gain access to our software.

If anybody approached us regarding the same matter in the future we'd gladly work together with them to make sure that they can use our software and contribute to our project, among other things by mirroring our repository and setting up an issue tracker that people who cannot access the Google Code project can use.

While I do not blame Google or Geeknet Inc. (formerely SourceForge Inc.) for following the letter of the law, I do regret that they have not taken a meaningful stand on the issue and instead opt to let their Terms of Use speak for them.

I'd be interested in hearing Chris DiBona's thoughts on this matter (currently open source engineering manager at Google, previously a Slashdot editor). As he is also a key individual in upholding Google's Term of Service at Google Code as indicated from the JSMin predicament.

As for the commentary by the story submitter that the blockage violates Section 5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups of the Open Source Definiton (OSD). I'd like to point out that the OSD actually specifically mentions export restrictions under Section 5., saying:

Some countries, including the United States, have export restrictions for certain types of software. An OSD-conformant license may warn licensees of applicable restrictions and remind them that they are obliged to obey the law; however, it may not incorporate such restrictions itself.

So I do not believe that there is a violation, though I do feel that the export restrictions go against the spirit of Open Source. Perhaps Bruce Perens (who hangs out here :-) could comment on this?

Best regards,

Bruce