8 ms·

I am in the USA, but I literally cannot comply because by design it is not possible for me to ship changes without the international maintainer team agreeing to

• rsyring 2mo ago
  Thank you.
• mebizzle 2mo ago
  Thank you for fighting the good fight.
• EA-3167 2mo ago
  I respect your principled stance on one hand, while on the other I’m amazed that someone as successful as you hasn’t learned that logic doesn’t dictate how governments work. Don’t make a target of yourself, there are countless ways for a government to make your life miserable.
  • lrvick 2mo ago
    I will never show fear to tech-illiterate bullies trying to compromise constitutionally protected rights. That is how freedoms get quietly lost. Users need to see that the people in positions of influence in FOSS projects they trust are not afraid of this bullshit. I -hope- someone is stupid enough to take a case like this to court so we can establish some much needed case law here. These overreaches deserve to be contested.
    • otterley 2mo ago
      > constitutionally protected rights Wait, which constitutionally protected right is that? I'm an attorney and constitutional scholar and am particularly interested in what right you believe is being violated here.
      • misphrasing 2mo ago
        Code is speech. Forcing someone to implement something is legally-compelled speech, assuming no complicating factor like commerce.
        • otterley 2mo ago
          That argument has been going on for decades, and has had few victories in the court system. The DMCA, which prohibits trafficking in anticircumvention devices, even though there's a lot of code in them, is still alive and well.
          • lrvick 2mo ago
            And the DMCA has been rightfully weakened to the point that archive.org has every Nintendo Gamecube game ever made hosted for the public, for years, uncontested. So too will these other silly laws go I expect.
            • iamnothere 2mo ago
              Not only that, but people like myself are working on underground distribution networks in case they’re ever needed. Absolute worst case we’ll do sneakernet. More likely we’ll just distribute via overlay networks. Some of us are crazy enough to be full on free speech martyrs, believe it or not.
        • hnlmorg 2mo ago
          I’m not a lawyer and even I know that argument would never hold up given the plethora of other laws that have been implemented through software. Not to mention copyright and patent claims too.
    • pixl97 2mo ago
      While they may take you to court over this, make sure you can survive sitting in jail at first if government decides to make an example of you. And where code is speech, is a distribution speech? There's a lot of places for this to go sideways on you personally.
      • lrvick 2mo ago
        The fact people are scared, or scared for me, is in and of itself a problem. But lets all wait for nothing at all to happen. Then confidence can grow over time that this is unenforceable in any effective way. They should go back to trying to police piracy via bittorrent (lol).
        • EA-3167 2mo ago
          I think the issue here is that while the people here are aware of the history and "utility" of laws like the one above, most people aren't and right now "regulate social media, the internet, and what my kid does with computers" is having quite a day. Inevitably all of this is framed in terms of keeping children safe, whereas piracy is at most a misdemeanor of very little consequence. Although I have no doubt that courts would ultimately side with you, the chance of becoming even a transient focus of a frustrated AG or congressperson looking to pin blame on "Out of touch and recalcitrant techies, the very ones who created this problem," is chilling. It's meant to be chilling, but it often works because he reality of what you'd go through on the way to eventual victory isn't trivial. Maybe you're willing to go through the courts (public opinion and otherwise), but if so the first thing any attorney you employ will beg you to do is stop talking the way you are. tl;dr I think taking a stand is great, I support that, I think doing it now is a good idea. I don't think you should talk about it in public though, especially not in a literal, "Come and get me" way.
          • pixl97 2mo ago
            Ya, I think op needs to study the history of civil rights in the US on how to do these things. Quite often the people that were getting arrested and challenging the state were specifically chosen because they didn't have any kind of dirt to dig up. The state is perfectly fine with playing dirty inside and outside the courtroom. The state would love the person brining a constitutional challenge to suddenly be marred in the eyes of the public as some kind of deviant.
    • JoshTriplett 2mo ago
      > I will never show fear "never show fear" and "never engage intelligence" are two different things. Understand what people will do in response to your actions, and act accordingly to achieve the outcomes you want. Please by all means fight the law, and do so intelligently in a way that will actually help.
      • dooglius 2mo ago
        Can you be specific in how you think he is behaving unintelligently, and what you think that people will do in response to his actions?
        • otterley 2mo ago
          I'll bite. His statements in this very forum could he used against him as evidence of intent to violate the law, should he be prosecuted someday. There's a reason why lawyers generally advise their clients to remain silent.
          • dooglius 2mo ago
            > There's a reason why lawyers generally advise their clients to remain silent. Most people prioritize their finances (and non-imprisonment) over their rights, and attorneys will optimize for that expressed preference. GP has clearly indicated his priorities are different. That has nothing to do with intelligence. Someone having a different set of values than you does not constitute unintelligence on his part.
            • kube-system 2mo ago
              GP said they wanted to take it to court. I presume that means they wanted to win, in which case the best strategy is to discuss the issue in private with an attorney before making public statements that could undermine your ability to win. If the actual priority here is advocacy, with no real desire to litigate, then I'd buy that.
• otterley 2mo ago
  There are a lot of remedies available to a court with respect to a recalcitrant party, ranging from an injunction to remove your product from the market to fines and imprisonment. Again, speak with your attorney. Do not try to "hack the law" yourself; many who have tried have regretted it later.
  • lrvick 2mo ago
    No need to hack the law. Our FOSS code is constitutionally protected free speech and I would defend on those grounds. The technical design of the project just makes it so no one can force changes on the distro unwanted by the maintainer team regardless of any courtroom outcomes. Like, what if someone made a law that said Bitcoin nodes must KYC? They could make the law I guess, and the international network operators would just laugh at it.
    • otterley 2mo ago
      The concern here is probably with the shipping of the product (i.e. the binary artifacts), not the code itself. I can imagine a situation in which you could continue to make the code available, but could not produce a shippable artifact from it that Illinoians could access.
      • lrvick 2mo ago
        If they are successful at doing so, then those distribution methods were too brittle. I expect in response one of the maintainers outside US jurisdiction of their own volition publishes via bittorrent, tor hidden services, and embedding blobs in public blockchains with no help from me. Then the problem the legislators sought to solve just got a lot worse, while calling a lot of attention to how little power they actually have to control decentralized FOSS software projects. Of course another point of the project is building the entire thing from source code with deterministic results only takes a few hours. For many, this would be faster than downloading artifacts. It is not needed for maintainers to publish binaries at all. Publishing signatures on the expected hashes would suffice at worst.
• deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
• 28304283409234 2mo ago
  Honey, that just means you cannot ship.
• polski-g 2mo ago
  If you're in the ninth circuit you're safe because of Bernstein v DoJ.
  • DennisP 2mo ago
    If you're in the sixth circuit you're even safer because of Junger vs Daley.
    • deleted 2mo ago
      [deleted]
    • otterley 2mo ago
      Stop it. This is not something either of you are competent to provide legal advice about. Anyone concerned about this should consult a licensed attorney, not get advice from randos on HN.
      • lrvick 2mo ago
        I for one found two new cases to read about, and appreciate their comments. Anyone should be free to research, discuss, and try to understand the law for themselves. Lawyers do not own the law. But if actually pulled into a courtroom, sure, get a lawyer.
        • otterley 2mo ago
          > Anyone should be free to research, discuss, and try to understand the law for themselves. Lawyers do not own the law. This isn't mere research and discussion; it's suggesting an outcome (i.e., "you're safe[r]"). That crosses a line into advice. > But if actually pulled into a courtroom, sure, get a lawyer. By the time you get pulled into a courtroom, it is often far too late. The time to talk to an attorney is well before that, when you’re contemplating action. That is the main point I’ve been trying to make, and it seems you just don’t want to pay heed. Yes, you've said multiple times that you're not afraid of the consequences, but you'll forgive me if I don't believe you. History is replete with people who regretted their actions once prosecutorial actions were commenced and punishments meted out. Defending oneself is expensive, and convictions impact not just the guilty but also their career and family. Ultimately, it's your life and you have to live with the decisions you make. (And, possibly, your family, should you have one.) Your bluster and actions may not harm you in this specific instance because you’re involved with a project too small to attract a prosecutor’s attention, but it doesn’t make my caution any less valid. It may not persuade you, personally, but hopefully others who read this will get the message.