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Open Source Against SOPA and PIPA

January 18, 2012 | Written by Steve Burge

Google Against SOPA

It's been hard to go online this week and not encounter protests against the SOPA and PIPA laws which the U.S. Congress has been considering.

There was a huge amount of pushback from online organizations, and open source projects led the way. Here's how some of the biggest reacted:

WordPress.com

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WordPress.com doesn't mention the word SOPA on their frontpage, but instead blacked out the area where blog posts normally appear. Click on the Censored boxes and you'll be taken to http://sopastrike.com/strike. They have also written a blog post on their protest.

WordPress.org

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WordPress.org has an even more comprehensive protest than WordPress.com. The entire frontpage is blacked out and you need to scroll all the way to the bottom to access the main site. There's a list of plugins which will take your site offline and a blog post explaining their position.

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Joomla

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Joomla.org has a banner across the top of their site and a blog post explaining their opposition. A template was available to help you join the strike.

PHP

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PHP.net has completely shut down their site frontpage and replaced it with an anti-SOPA message. There's no way to reach the main PHP site today from the frontpage, but you can access internal pages directly.

Free Software Foundation

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The FSF has provided much of the legal thought and support behind the success of open source projects. It's not surprising that they took a strong stand against the law and entirely blacked out: FSF.org.

Mozilla

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Mozilla.org went black on their frontpage but allowed people to proceed to the main site via a footer link.

Other Projects


 

 


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Comments  

 
#1 ircmaxell 2012-01-18 15:50
PHP.net is functioning fine. Only the home page is down. All of the other pages, including the auto-search feature work fine. To see what I mean, try going to www.php.net/strpos it does work...
 
 
#2 steve 2012-01-18 15:53
Thanks Anthony - I updated the PHP.net details.
 
 
#3 Marcos Peebles 2012-01-19 02:00
Great things. Sadly Drupal and Joomla popped in quite late. Too late too few imho. But they reacted and that's a positive. Thanks for the overview Steve.

Can't help mentioning opentranslators .org who took action and made some 'noise' out there too ;)
 

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