Re: youtube-dl DMCA takedown on GitHub is risk for all GNU/Linux distributions

[Pedro Lucas Porcellis]

On Thu, Oct 29, 2020 at 09:08:32PM +0330, Ali Reza Hayati wrote:
> Much of this, as you said, is the problem of unjust laws that are
> affecting software. For example, my country, Iran, is under U.S.
> sanctions. As a result, GitHub and GitLab are blocking us and banning
> our accounts.
> 
> For every service based in United States, no matter what's the use,
> there's a chance for us Iranians to be blocked.
> 
> We can't pay for even small services such as a VPS or a hosting. My
> website is currently hosted by a guy in Germany for free because I can't
> pay anyone for hosting.
> 
> I really do want to host my own Mastodon or Pixelfed or Peertube
> instances but no, I can't because of sanctions and these sanctions are
> stupid because they don't affect the government but affects us people. I
> can't think of any way that me buying a hosting service can violate U.S.
> or world's laws over nuclear weapons.

And that's why we can't deattach politics from the free software
movement. This may sounds like taking sand to the beach, but it's
something that's been bugging me for a while. Free Software can help on
dealing with those problems, as you can have decentralized software
which respects the four essencial freedoms (like Sourcehut as a Github
replacement, Mastodon/Pleroma as a Twitter alternative, etc), but if all
main datacenters in the world and infra options are on the US/Europe,
then the problem will never be solved. I think that the free software
movement, must seek to unity with radical politics that seeks to
strenght national infrastructure (and therefore improving strategic
sectors like tech) which would help to deal with that kind of shit. 

> These are some of the problems only in the matter of economy in
> software that we're facing because of unjust laws. As long as we have
> discrimination and injustices like this, we remain in same situation,
> sadly.

By the way, most of those sanctions are not only unjust, but deadly [1]
and illegal [2].  After sanctions were invented people just forgot about
what Imperialism [3] means and why it does what it does.

--
[1]: https://cepr.net/images/stories/reports/venezuela-sanctions-2019-04.pdf
[2]: 
https://truthout.org/articles/us-sanctions-are-deadly-illegal-and-ineffective
[3]: Lenin's "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism" helps here