You made the point exactly! (Score 1)

Of course it's silly to talk about whether or not code is speech. It most decidedly must be speech. I had intended to make this point, but you've made it much more precisely. It is only by clouding the point that code is speech that the government can pawn off on us the idea that:
1) code can be made illegal to export
2) that the ideas expressed by code can be made illegal to share
It's the height of stupidity not to see that the moral and legal bases for checks on the sharing of code are ridiculous. It's just the coldwar psyche of governments that pushes this sort of stuff on us. The free exchange of information just isn't in the national interest. With enough of it, we would see how silly nations are, and that just isn't in the national self-interest. Unrestricted individual liberty (of which truly free speech - which does not exist in the good ol' U.S. of A - is the most important part) recognizes the individual as the most important political unit, but democracy recognizes society collectively as the most important political unit. The free exchange of ideas is ultimately undemocratic, uncommunist, and un-everyothersortofpoliticalideology.