In a move that must surely strike at the very core of open source, FOSS, and the heart of GNU crusader Richard Stallman, SourceForge has now blocked all access from by countries on the U.S. 'Foreign Assets Control sanction list'.

Source Forge has banned downloads from Syria, Iran, Sudan, Cuba, and North Korea. Funny enough, the decision came after US Secretary of State speech on Internet's freedom.
In Syria, the Open Source community is upset and felt that the decision is against principles of software freedom.

The Obama Administration has forced Sourceforge to deny service to its anti-terrorism sanction list. In practical terms this means people in Cuba, North Korea, the Sudan, Syria and Iran get “403 forbidden” messages when they try to access sourceforge.org addresses. (Here’s how the Armenian Private School in Toronto, Canada displays 403 errors.)

SourceForge has now changed their policy regarding their ban on users from "sanctioned countries."

Sourceforge.net provides ability to move export control (relating to US laws) regulations to project administrator's hands. This can be used to move responsibility about providing access for ``baneed'' countries from themselves to projects leadership.

"Sourceforge just became the latest US-based entity to censor Syria along with five other countries. Despite being one of the leading proponents of Free Software, Sourceforge has succumbed to pressure from the US government to deny access to its products to millions of people.

Since 1999, SourceForge has the 'go to place' for all open source downloads, but in the last couple of years, Google Code has put up a bit of challenge. Remember also for a while there was this constant thread in media about how SourceForge had 100,000 project, though most had been abandoned.

SourceForge.net (part of SourceForge, Inc., NASDAQ: LNUX), the world’s largest web site for open source development and distribution, today launched an online marketplace for technology professionals to buy and sell service and support for open source software.

SourceForge has been running a community-driven awards process over the last month, trying to discover the top open-source projects. On Friday, the winners were announced. The ones selected say a lot about those who frequent SourceForge. But before I get into that, here are the winners: