Notepad++ 5.7 release (outside the USA)

2010-07-05

Under the pretext of cryptographic exportation control, US government made the major FOSS hosts (SourceForge, Google code, Fedora, etc…) in USA territory comply with the Export Administration Regulations. As a result they reject the access of FOSS resources from the 5 countries (Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria) in the “black list” of US government.

It’s not the first time that a government try to control Internet access to protect its interest. One of most famous examples is the Grand Firewall of China. Obviously the US government is walking into the footsteps of the Chinese government. In our case it’s about the violation of FOSS community’s right, we cannot just let it happen without doing something. It should never be any government to decide who has the access right to FOSS resource and who has not.

A walk around from SourceForge

After complying with this law, SourceForge provided an option “Export Control: non-encryption algorithms included”. A mail to make this option explicit was sent to all project managers on SF recently. It’s the only FOSS host who offers such walk around as far as I know. We appreciate all their efforts and we will keep our binary releases on SourceForge.

So here it is the version 5.7, which (and the future versions) is (will be) released on both sourceforge.net and tuxfamily.org (France) - that ensures the access of Notepad++ resources is out of US government control and guarantees the freedom of access of Notepad++ resource for everyone.

Update (the 27th September 2012):

Both binaries and source code of Notepad++ have not been available on SourceForge since the 4th June 2011. Due to the difficulty of maitenance, they are not distributed on SourceForge anymore.