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The Register has published an interview with Roozbeh Shafiee, a "Cloud Infrastructure Architect" and Iran's OpenStack community manager:
[...] The Register: What's the technology community like in Iran? Are there lots of meet-ups and user groups?
Roozbeh Shafiee: There are too many communities based on technologies in Iran. Open source communities like Linux User Groups (LUG), OpenStack Users Group, Docker and Python (PUG) to startup communities like Startup Grind and Startup Weekend are active and hold their periodic meetings and meet-ups every week, or at least once a month. You can find their pages on meetup.com.
[...] The Register: What do foreign sanctions mean to you, your work and your family?
Roozbeh Shafiee: It is not true if I say the foreign sanctions do not effect on our life and work. Prices for goods and commodities were the first to be affected by the sanctions, for people and the government. But we had to find a way to overcome problems caused by sanctions and finally we did it. We found a way to meet the requirements. We couldn't use them in the production stage but we found the technologies for future self-sufficiency. For example, I was present at one of those projects for more than a year, designing and producing a native storage server.
The Register: Is that the MetaNAS project listed on your GitHub page? Why did you develop them? How long did it take?
Roozbeh Shafiee: In middle of 2011, after a range of sanctions by the US and Europe because of Iran's nuclear activities, we started these projects to produce our native products. The main goal and reason for these projects was to produce cost-effective native products for our domestic consumption.
LibreBSD was an open-source software platform for producing native enterprise appliances and equipment. MetaNAS was one of my projects for the company I worked for previously. The development of the early version of that took two years. That was focussed on a small operating system for our native storage servers for small businesses.
The Register: What will the Vienna agreements to remove sanctions mean for you, your work and your family?
Roozbeh Shafiee: For us, the Vienna agreements mean a return to the world community, reconciliation with the world, more interaction and co-operation in science, technology, economy and politics, and more respect in a win-win game. Iran is a country with young people and is the second country in its population of engineers, according to world statistics. This opportunity means we can help each other to make and improve a better world.
In short, today is the first day of the rest of our lives for all of us.
Other (and actual) eXpat Files articles are worth checking out.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday July 27 2015, @08:48AM
It had advanced civilization when the Europeans were living in caves.
I have always been skeptical of economic embargoes. Consider Iraq: the people still had plenty of food because they grew it themselves. What they lacked was imported food but Iraqi food is quite tasty.
Any nation with any significant natural resources will also have lots of engineers. I expect that Ronald Reagan helped when he deported all the Iranian University students. That disrupted the lives of most of the students but Iran gained a whole bunch of people with college educations.
I hope to visit Iran someday. Americans - at least recently - have been welcome to travel there as the embargo was against certain organizations such as the Republican Guard, certain specific individuals as well as the export of certain technologies.
I haven't checked lately but a while back I learned from Google Trends that the nation that searched the most for "ebook" and "pdf" was Iran. While some may have been trying to circumvent press censorship I expect many were searching for technical books.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]