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 Anonymous Coward on Monday July 27 2015, @02:44AM
I work at a university; this spring I had the pleasure of meeting a young woman from Tehran who was working in our supercomputing research group. She did her BS and MS in Iran, her PhD in the States, and was absolutely brilliant at developing physics simulations. She was also drop-dead gorgeous.
People in the US have this bizarre notion that Iran is some place where women are frequently stoned to death whenever they're not being repressed and enslaved, that there are no computers because Allah forbids godless machines, that there is no science but what the Prophet commands, or whatever. It's just not true.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 27 2015, @03:16AM
Iran is different from all the arab countries in that the average Moe on the street has a very favorable attitude towards the US, while the regime is in opposition to the US. In all the arab states the regime has favorable relations with the US (even Syria because ISIS!) while the average Moe on the street is neutral if not outright hostile to the US.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 27 2015, @03:38AM
I don't know anything about Middle East politics beyond what the average citizen knows, but I suspect that Obama - just by being a black POTUS - had a pretty profound effect on opinions over there. The fact that he was elected showed that the USA walked the walk when it came to democracy and freedom. I wonder if "Arab Spring" was partly a reaction to that (of course, it has created at least as many headaches as opportunities for the US government).
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 27 2015, @04:01AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 27 2015, @04:38AM
I would have chalked that up to the poor state of the economy and food shortages, as background fuel for the fire, while the self-immolation of a man who felt abused by a regime that was corrupt internally, a man who probably never heard of wikileaks, was the spark that set off the fire.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 27 2015, @05:28AM
That man was being harrassed and disrespected by a female cop.
I'm sure your cunt moderators will downvote this fact.
(Score: 2) by ticho on Monday July 27 2015, @06:52AM
Not the fact, just its inflammatory delivery.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Monday July 27 2015, @04:44AM
"walked the walk"
Uhhhh, no. And, an Iranian will be the first to set you straight on that. Operation Ajax was the definitive action. The Wikipedia has a pretty good article on Ajax. I'll take the liberty of summarizing:
In 1954 Iran had a genuine democracy, legitimately elected by the people. That government wanted a little more money from BP for the oil that BP was pumping out of the ground in Iran. The US-UK decided that any government that wanted to extort money from an OIL COMPANY needed to die. Operation Ajax was put into motion by the CIA to overthrow the legitimate democracy in Iran, so that a pliable puppet could be installed.
Walk the walk? Only if the walkway is well oiled.
Let's be realistic here. Not every Iranian hates the US. Nor does every Iranian love the US. The fact is, there are still people alive in Iran who remember what we did to them, and those people have good reason to hate us. Or, at the least, they have good reason to hate our government, and the oil companies.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Monday July 27 2015, @06:23PM
I'm not disagreeing with your point, just adding a bit. Mosaddegh (elected Iranian leader) yes wanted to audit and get a better deal for Iran's oil with BP, but when that was refused he threatened to nationalize their oil industry, as the Iranians of course had every right to do. That, combined with the fact that he was elected with Communists in his coalition, was enough to gain support in the US for his overthrow in the 1950's. Add anti-Communist sentiments with threatened oil profits and you had better duck.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 27 2015, @05:10AM
> I suspect that Obama - just by being a black POTUS - had a pretty profound effect on opinions over there.
And the fact that under Obama the drone program has killed at least an order of magnitude more innocents than under Bush undid much of it. The news rarely reports it over here but drone killings are a big deal over there. Big.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 27 2015, @03:03AM
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⌒ヽ... ... Hey bobbi, wanna smoke some crack while you're in limbo?
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(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]