Re: CoC policy for package contents

On Wednesday, July 23, 2025 12:21:38 PM Mountain Standard Time Russ Allbery 
wrote:
> [email protected] writes:
> > There may be some edge cases. What if a country decided to forbid
> > shipping youtube downloaders ? Or gambling software ?
> 
> Or cryptographic algorithms that do not have government back doors.

That is a good point.  In the past, Debian dealt with the issue of 
cryptographic export legislation by effectively having two archives of Debian, 
on that could be distributed in the US and one that couldn’t.

We could certainly try to go down that road again.  However, as world laws get 
more fractured on these issues, I think the more likely route is that we are 
going to decide there are certain jurisdictions where we are going to refuse 
to distribute and support Debian rather than complying with their laws.  
Partially because having 50 different versions of Debian is unsustainable from 
a volunteer effort perspective.

In a more general sense, I think that the divergence of an international legal 
standard on a whole host of issues is probably going to be the single greatest 
threat to Debian in the decades to come.  We saw this on a very small scale 
with the sanctions placed on Russia.  By its nature, open-source software is 
developed collaboratively on an international scale.

What happens when war breaks out between significant international players?

What happens when countries pass laws that prohibit the use of software with 
contributions from citizens of countries with which they are at war?

What happens when countries pass laws that prohibit the distribution of 
software to citizens of countries with which they are at war?

Debian could likely find itself in a situation where they can no longer 
continue to operate in countries on both sides of an armed conflict.  At that 
point, it can either fracture into two organizations, one on each side of the 
conflict.  Or, it can case to operate in countries on one side of the 
conflict.

To make this more complex, I don’t think we will end up with just two sides of 
a conflict like we have had for the last 80 years or so.  Rather, things are 
moving towards a more splintered future.

Most of what I have written above doesn’t directly address the topic at hand, 
except for the sense that I think any Code of Acceptable Content policy should 
be explicit that we follow all legal requirements for the content we ship, but 
only for those jurisdiction where we operate.  Currently that is the whole 
world (as far as I know), but it won’t be able to stay that way indefinitely.

-- 
Soren Stoutner
[email protected]

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