Ephera

Not really. Maybe there’s a torrent of the source code somewhere, maybe as part of Debian or whatever. But you’d have to adjust the automatic build process to use the torrented source code. Certainly not impossible, but a pain.

If a workaround is introduced by NixOS itself, they could mirror the source code onto another Git provider, at least I saw that suggested in the discussion I stumbled across.

Side-note: I’m not from the UK myself. repo.or.cz just wasn’t reachable, from what looked like a denial of service attack or AI scrapers, that’s why I looked this up.
Although right now, I believe I can reach it fine, but get a wrong checksum for the source artifact, so hopefully they haven’t been hacked. 😵‍💫

Yesterday, I read that certain software packages on the NixOS Linux distribution cannot be used in the UK, because they require downloading from the Git provider repo.or.cz, which just flat-out bans any traffic from the UK due to the Online Safety Act.

I have a colleague with two kids, who’s actually not unhappy about *something* being done to try to prevent children from accessing the internet unfiltered. But that colleague is a huge fan of NixOS, too.

So yeah, oof, even before we get into the very concrete problems this article talks about, there’s a lot of nuance these laws need to get right.