Journalists Having Bad Ideas About Software Development

So a tech journalist just suggested that open source should "ban itself" in certain countries based on geopolitics. That's like suggesting gravity should stop working in specific time zones because of trade disputes.

The entire point of open source is that the code is, well, open. It's publicly available. You can't "ban" something that's already distributed across millions of repositories, forks, and local machines worldwide. Even if you deleted every GitHub repo tomorrow, the code would still exist on countless hard drives, mirrors, and archive sites.

Trying to geofence open source is like trying to un-ring a bell or put toothpaste back in the tube. The MIT license doesn't come with geographical restrictions for a reason. That's literally the opposite of how information distribution works on the internet.

But hey, at least we got a solid Boromir meme out of someone's fundamental misunderstanding of software licensing and distribution.