If it was truly global, I could accept it grudgingly. But this is a single actor: the US. The US gets to decide who has access in other countries to stuff built by people all over the world. It's not the US saying "this cannot be accessed by US citizens", effectively only affecting its own citizens (who can then exert some pressure on their own government if they disagree with the restriction); it's the US deciding what other countries can access. And the stuff they are deciding on is collaborative, not 100% built by US citizens.

It's not global. It's unilateral.

The company is based in the US. It's therefore subject to US law. There's nothing stopping anyone from forking / rehosting these things outside of the US.

Your answer reinforces what I'm saying: the US is unilaterally enforcing, through sanctions or legal pressure on a US company, restrictions on a shared "free" project. Hence, "free" isn't free.

> There's nothing stopping anyone from forking / rehosting these things outside of the US.

How can this be done legally, when access to the git repo was removed because he was an Iranian?

More importantly: FOSS projects thrive with global collaboration. If access is unilaterally restricted, while it's true the author could just take his local copy of the repo and host it someplace else, he will lose access to many of his collaborators. I'm going to go out on a limb and risk that Americans contributing to software projects hosted in Iran or in countries friendly with Iran are also going to be at risk.

This isn't being global, which was my point: this is being US-centric.

> This isn't being global, which was my point: this is being US-centric

That's fair. Interpreting or framing this as [the US valuing a specific kind of influence on Iran over them valuing the benefits of collaboration] makes sense.