5 ms·

What light does that sentence put things in? It's not been 30 years since the US tried to prosecute the author of PGP for the crime of FOSS development.

• franga2000 7y ago
  > the US tried to prosecute the author of PGP for the crime of FOSS development If you're referring to what I think you are, then no, his "crime" was publishing a product that was not allowed to be exported to the public (effectively exporting it). You're statement is equivalent to serving poisoned food and saying you were prosecuted for the crime of owning a restaurant. No matter if you agree with the export ban or not, it was a law and Zimmerman broke it. That's what he was prosecuted for.
  • chc 7y ago
    How does this disagree with my point, which was that creating FOSS can get you in trouble with the law (particularly given all the random jurisdictions your contributors might be in), and thus "You should not use services that can rat on you and your friends to the cops" seems like a fair value to hold in the context of FOSS development?
    • UncleEntity 7y ago
      > How does this disagree with my point, which was that creating FOSS can get you in trouble with the law... Creating (or in this case distributing) anything that's against the law could get you in trouble with the law -- kind of how it works.
    • franga2000 7y ago
      Creating FOSS does not get you in trouble with the law. Creating things that are against the law gets you in trouble with the law - FOSS or otherwise (in Zimmerman's case, even if PGP were proprietary, publishing it internationally was illegal). I have a hard time seeing why a FOSS project* would care about discord ratting them out in case of illegal activity if they weren't doing any. Unless the idea of FOSS is illegal, as your comment suggested, but that is plain false (in your example and in all jurisdictions I am even remotely familiar with). * - except for things like Signal, Tor..., which are illegal some places, but they probably wouldn't even consider Discord in the first place