Embarcadero and Iran Embargo

Are you an Iranian Delphi (or C++ Builder, or JBuilder) developer? Have you noticed that while you are in Iran, some pages of Embarcadero website do not load?

You might have thought it is your ISP, or maybe Iranian filtering system, or maybe your browser, which are causing the problem, because other visitors are using the website with no such problems, and nobody has reported such problems. Well, if you thought that way, you are wrong!

It was some months (or maybe a year) ago that I noticed I cannot log into Embarcadero forums (web interface for their newsgroups). It was telling me that my username\password was not valid! I retried my username\password several times, and even tried to make it to email me my password, but no success! Eventually I decided to create a new username, and tell them about my problem in the forum, but when I was creating the new account, I noticed that Iran is not in Countries list, and I have to choose another country if I want to create an account in their website. It was there that I found out they deleted my previous forum ID without any notification just because Iran was chosen as my country!

Days passed and April 2010 came, I noticed that some Iranian Delphi developers were reporting problems about accessing EDN (Embarcadero Developers Network). EDN provides some articles, news reports, and white papers about Embarcadero products for software developers. I thought it must have been some ISP problems, but since I wasn’t sure, I created a topic in Embarcadero forums, and asked if EDN is down. Some users mentioned they have no problem accessing it in Europe, and later on, my topic got deleted from their forum, and I received an email from one of Embarcadero employees that this is due to their respected company’s policies in complying with US embargo, and I should keep it as a confidential note!

Now it’s been some days (maybe 1 or 2 weeks) that I found out accessing weblogs belonging to Delphi team members on Embarcadero website, and also documents wiki website (online version of Delphi documentation) is not possible from Iran.

So, if you use any of Embarcadero products (either buying it legally or not) and you travel to Iran for a visit or live in Iran, you are not allowed to check their website, their weblogs, or their online documentations, put aside downloading trial versions or updates from their website! OK, they say it is so to comply with US embargo against Iran, but it is weird, as far as I know, when someone does something nice and according to law, they must be usually proud of it, but Embarcadero is not (!!) because they do not like you to know that they put such restrictions on some people; they do not bother redirecting you to a page saying this content is not available to you due to US embargo. They rather you think it is a server or Internet connection issue, not an organized restriction imposed by the company. That’s why you don’t see any explanation from them, or you do not receive any notifications when your accounts are removed from their website, or your post gets deleted when you ask them about it in their forums.

It is also interesting to know why they are restricting access to such contents as online help or their employees weblogs? Because if they are following US laws, then banning product downloads from Iranian IP ranges should be enough. Why banning access to developers’ weblogs or online help documentations?! Companies like Google, Oracle, or Yahoo impose restrictions on downloading their products to Iranians too; for example you cannot directly download Google Chrome, or Yahoo Messenger from Iran, but they do not restrict their employees weblogs, or announcements for new coming products. Actually it seems Embarcadero likes ambiguity, as they expressed this interest in their published roadmap which was more confusing than clarifying. You can read about it more here.

Maybe the reason Embarcadero decided to ban their website content on Iranians was popularity of Delphi in Iran, and they thought making such restrictions make Iranian people feel the pressure more, and as you might know, US government believes such stupid pressures will eventually lead to people uprising in Iran, and making the country to agree with US demands! I know you might say nowadays Delphi’s popularity is not as before, and Visual Studio and .NET are currently the most popular development tools there, but so far Microsoft hasn’t imposed so called US embargo on Iran that way; that is they do not sell their products in Iran, but they haven’t banned MSDN or their download pages, or their online services for Iranians yet. So if they are supposed to put pressure, why not restricting Microsoft contents in Iran? Maybe Microsoft is kept for later stages of pressure on Iranian people, or maybe they are afraid if they ban very popular websites or tools, the result might get reversed, and people might feel more enmity toward US government.

BTW, If you are a software developer in Iran, you already know how to nullify so-called US sanctions; so I didn’t go for explaining how to do so!

I have a lot to say about US embargo against Iran, that I think I should write about in another post some other time.

Have Fun!

P.S. 1. Today (May 26, 2010) I tried to read Craig Stuntz’s blog post on TeamB website, and this site makes the same restrictions on Iranians as official EDN website. So you can add TeamB to the list too.

P.S.2. Today (June 18, 2010) I found out Embarcadero forums are added to the restricted websites too. If Embarcadero had took developing their products as seriously as they took banning Iranian users, they would have probably had better products by far!