Here's something you may never have to see in your lifetime:
This is not something new to me and many others. In fact these sort of di...
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I'm sorry you have to deal with this. Github is a symbol for open source, which is about bringing people together across boundaries. This nationality-based discrimination is the opposite of that, adding insult to injury. I hope GitHub does a
git revertand rolls back these changes. Sending support to the repo from the US!GitHub is a symbol for Microsoft buying developers 🙈
BAH! shakes cane
Before I start, I want to extend my sympathy to OP and others in his position. It sucks. Also, discussing politics implies disagreement about important issues. What I am about to write may not fit in to your world view, dear reader, but that is not a personal rejection of anyone.
That being said,
The problem here isn't US trade sanctions, it's the theocratic autocracy that runs Iran, a country in which human rights are widely suppressed. That government has been for decades actively pursuing the means to attack my country with nuclear weapons, which, unless you are some kind of anti-semite, you probably agree would be terrible.
It is and has been for years the stated goal of the Iranian government initiate a religious war which they hope will begin with the destruction of Israel and end with global conquest in the name of their extreme, twisted misinterpretation of Islam. You can choose to believe that they are not serious about this, but they have done nothing to indicate that they aren't. I give them the credit they are due and assume they mean what they have repeatedly said and backed up by their actions.
If you are against trade sanctions, would you prefer military action? I would not.
There is absolutely no chance that our community of free thinking individualists would have any hope of operating under the Iranian dictatorship with the kind of freedom and impunity we enjoy in the West.
I have only love and hope for OP and those in similar circumstances. I have nothing against your country or your people and hope that the historically strong ties between the Jews and the people of Iran will be soon restored. The fanatic dictator Khamenei and his cronies are a different story. Many Iranians stand quietly against their evil government, and I stand with them.
The morality of trade embargoes aside, any service that is brittle enough to alienate portions of their user base over regional turmoil goes against the entire point of the web.
Please respect the fact that there is a significant amount of political history that went into the decision to embargo Iran outside of the context that you’re offering - I understand that this is a very delicate issue, but detailing your personal opinions on the morality of a government or group of people isn’t necessarily a productive topic when discussing the resilience of services we use to keep our code.
The exact point I'm making is that the services we use to keep our code are inextricable parts of that political context.
In actual fact, we have those services, and that culture, because of that political history.
No liberal democracy, no GitHub.
I think that there are two areas of discussion here - the moral justifications of an embargo, and the need to remove the effects of the whims of some central authority. We absolutely have the ability to create decentralized, federated services to commit out code to in the nature of protecting all developers from this kind of embargo.
Overwhelmingly most of the open source community is built around the idea of solidarity among developers - regardless of ethnicity or nationality, race or creed. The fact of the matter is, this is a technical issue caused by a political one, but this is not a political forum. For that reason, I believe that we should keep the discussion on-topic for the type of forum that this is, and take steps to reinforce our community against the effects of racist policy.
What you're calling racist policy, I call nonviolent sanctions that predate the Trump administration and are meant to prevent genocide.
And if those policies do prevent that genocide, that's a good thing.
This might not be a political forum (a premise which strikes me as highly debatable) but this is certainly a political topic. If you don't like political debates here, you should take umbrage with OP, not with me, friend.
I'm going to sign off with this - you still haven't addressed my key point here, being that solidarity with other developers stands beyond political leanings. I'm trying to steer the conversation from the political cause to the actions we can take to prevent it from harming our communities.
Advocating for disciplinary action against a group of people due to their nationality is racist, and I'm not willing to discuss the finer points of acceptable state violence (here, in the form of discrimination) against the citizens of any nation.
I am, however, very invested in forming a conversation around building alternatives to platforms such as GitHub that ensure users the freedom from this kind of state-sanctioned discrimination.
I hope that this news mobilizes developers to get involved in the discussion. This is not a situation with an easy answer, and it needs to be elevated so that we don't let it get swept away as we move past this news cycle.
Here's another discussion going on right now as well:
Github Must Be a Free Platform
Milad Nekofar ・ Jul 26 '19 ・ 1 min read
I really appreciate you getting involved in this discussion. It's a long shot and it may not even happen but the least they can do is give us access to download our private repositories.
I totally agree with you dear friend In the text above
Yo DEVs! I'm a backend dev and open source advocate, Cuban by birth, and currently living in NorthEast Cuba. A few weeks ago, in one of the Telegram channel when mostly of the FOSS advocates of the Island, gather to share knowledge, projects, questions, or simple 'how is your day?', We made a curated list of all the open source projects in GitHub by now. Here's the link: Cuban Open Sourcers
By now, some of those contributors already have the notification of thier account to be restricted, the rest of us are expecting it soon.
Now Github joins SlackHQ, Docker, Dell, Gitlab, and many other companies or online services we have restricted due to US laws.
This is a bad news for all the Cuban devs, and for the other fellows devs of the countries affected as well. We really hope this could be solved.
I am a strong advocate of the
3-2-1 Rule of Backups, which is: At least three (3) backup copies total, in at least two (2) different formats (hard drive, optical media, thumb drive, etc.) with at least one (1) backup being stored off-premises, whatever that means for your specific situation (cloud storage/remote repo, at work/home/school, safety deposit box, etc.)As far as I am concerned, if it is not backed up 3-2-1 it might as well not exist at all, because when it's gone, it's gone.
The at least's in that formula strongly encourages doing more than the minimum, especially in whatever area(s) you feel might be the greatest risk, whether that be location, form, or just sheer number of copies, or all of the above.
Just make sure you develop a naming/version numbering system that allows you to quickly identify the latest copy of the resource, so you may be sure your backups are the latest versions (along with normal version control operations, in order to be able to restore some prior versions as needed as well.)
Any advice on how to automatically copy those repositories across several providers?
Having automatically up-to-date copies of whole repositories doesn't sound like anything fun to setup.
GitHub actions sound like something quite suitable for this
With all of the controversy at NPM sparking new, decentralized alternatives such as entropic, we should really start discussing how to start federating our own git repos as well.
Centralizing resources like our code on any platform is incredibly volatile - in this case, Microsoft made a business decision to cut off Iranian users without warning to avoid fines.
No matter where you stand on the subject of ethics, we can only ever rely on any for-profit company to work for the interests of their shareholders. The catch is, entire swaths of our community will only be welcome to use cornerstone services of the web at the whim of people in power who have proven themselves to be racist, negligent, and a force of net harm towards certain communities.
The people at GitHub have worked tirelessly (and invested in a ton of PR) to present themselves as arbiters of free and open source software - but as long as they are centralized, we can never be sure of the fact that this won’t happen due to a new whim of some local authority. For the sake of the entire open source community, we can do a lot better.
To complete the picture, I'm linking this thread by Nat Friedman (CEO of GitHub):
To sum up a couple of highlights:
I am really socked... Just added my contribution. I'll do my bests for this to change, github should be for everyone, without discrimination.
Thanks. Apparently repos made by restricted users isn't making it on the trending list.
My pleasure. About the trending list, it's not only that. I think that the algorithm for the trending repos has been changed, without any update from Github, a week ago I sent them an e-mail to explain what is changed to the community, never got a reply about it.
How I know it? Repositories with 5-10 stars are shown in the list and some of my own repos with 20-30 per day don't. The order of listing is also changed, it doesn't order by the highest to lowest number of stars anymore.
I don't know whats happened after the microsoft's acquisition and I am not even a guy who ever hated Microsoft.
Αnd now I hear this about users got ban because of a country they are living on. I am really disappointed and angry in the same time.
I appreciate the support. BTW, it's not based on where you live, it's been confirmed that it's soely based on your nationality.
And how do they determine your nationality!?
(I don't think I've stated mine.)
I'm very interested to know how too.
This kind of banning based on compliance with US laws remains unethical and must be denounced (and resisted) by the community of developers and tech professionnals. Github response that it is only complying with US laws is not good enough. Companies as well as individuals have no obligation to obey unjust laws. If they choose to obey without questionning these laws, it means they are consciously adhering to these unethical policies. Companies have under national laws and international laws the obligation to respect human rights. It may be argued that this banning of individuals based on their ethnicity or their country of origin is violating some people's human rights. These US based companies could resist complying based on these consequences. If they choose not to do so, it means they are consciously subscribing to these questionable policies. What strikes is that these companies have greatly relied on open source software development and have drawn a great deal of profit from open source software development that have seen developers from around the world contribute to products such as docker, git, linux, java, etc... And now, some of these people are being collectively excluded by the same companies that have striven on free circulation of code and knowledge. This is simply unacceptable. It is all the more unacceptable that this is being used to settle political rivalries. Developers and Tech professionals should unite to resist these trends.
I always thought developer community is one place where you are judged by your contribution instead of your ethinicity, gender, race e.t.c. Really feel bad that you have to go through this. There is no point arguing with people who think it's sane. Regarding every countries merit, just read news and you will find almost every country have history of atrocities against others. It's sad when open source community is divided on this. I hope this get sorted soon
A very unethical step by GitHub. If they continue to involve politics,it will have bad business consequences for GitHub . That's insane.
Lol, what?) I am not sure about their existing if they continued to provide their service to terrorist countries
1 Because CNN declares somebody terrorist for political reasons doesn't mean one is actually terrorist
2 These people were using GitHub for ages,how many people they killed via code that you can go and check how that code fires bullets
3 One should be rationale not like going with wind flow,media and politics should not be mixed with all things
4 Imagine you are somebody who makes living by writing code and not actually a terrorist,how would you feel? You of course cannot feel the pain otherwise you would not have put up such stupid comment
5 People like you are in face real terrorists who have no sane minds, somebody like you was there in GitHub management who took this decision
6 It still makes sense to follow county rules which GitHub did but calling those who make living by writing code and growing their children and families is absolutely unethical and insane.
7 Your comment showed your thinking level and personality so I wouldn't expect sane or good comments developing in that mind and coming out from that mouth.
I doubt that. It's not Github who said "eh just block Iran lulw". I'm sure they didn't want to do that at all, but if you're going to ignore the laws of the country in which you're doing the business, it will fall down very quickly. And since Github is not a non-profit organization, I guess it would cost them less to block Iran rather than get kicked off of U.S. That sounds horrible, but that's how it works.
Well, I don't watch CNN, so you are wrong from beginning. If they develop calmly in their country with terrorist government, it means, that they support it(developing nuclear weapon etc)So, why do they use enemy's service? I'd like companies be even more tough on things like this.
Remarks. By support I mean no physicals, I mean mental support of ideology and doings. And I think it is wrong and stupid ban people from Iran, who live and commit from other countries for many ages
I intellectually understand why the company is doing this, but it definitely seems like they're throwing Iranian devs under the bus instead of expending some effort to figure out how they can be accommodated. This is a bad look for GitHub.
Github has no say in any of this all they can do is comply with trade bans. If Github was still doing business in Iran they'd be fined.
You know, I feel for you since I also come from a very difficult country as well, it's easy for others to tell us to "overthrow" our authoritarian governments/dictatorships and restore peace when it reality it's not as simple and the political actions taken by other countries to pressure them out will always end up affecting the population in one way or another.
Sometimes industries, without wanting to have to comply. I wouldn't take Github's actions personal at all, they're trying to stay inside the law. I'm sure this doesn't only affects the tech industry but also other ones.
Does it suck to be in the middle of the mess? oh yeah it does! but the best we can do is to accept and try to look for the positives and opportunities when a bad situation happens, because we can't control it and we can't change it. Is it a very cliche advice? probably, but it's the one that has kept me going these past few years.
Hopefully things get better over there soon <3
That's really sad! it'll hurt none but the open source community
The only reason I stay on github is to access dev.to.
@thepracticaldev Will you add auth by email ?
Our governments are curses that will stick with us for eternity apparently. I feel you brother. Even though I fled my country Syria long time ago, lots of my friends are facing these troubles and we are sick trying to find alternatives.
Unfortunately, US based companies (GitHub) has no choice but to follow the governments punishments on some countries and ban their services there.
All this makes us really late in the internet evolution. I know we are miles away but I have hope in the coming 10 years (blockchain is going to change a lot of things)
Hopefully.
I think that UK does not impose those sanctions, could be worth investigating and hosting a GitLab on a server in UK.
I don't think the UK is in a much better position due to its close ties with the US.[1]
Some have suggested gitlab as an alternative, and I've seen they have attempted to make it easy to migrate from github, but wikipedia indicates they're also US based and so directly subject to the control of the US government.
Has someone come up a list of alternatives, with an indication of their exposure to the US government's decisions?
[1] Having said that, at least if you're a UK citizen, you have some influence with the decision makers. If you're not a US citizen, it is unreasonable to be subject to the decisions of the US government when you have no influence on them, so choosing services based elsewhere only makes sense (IMO). It reminds me of the phrase, 'no taxation without representation'.
I thought gitlab used to be open source before and available for download; that's why I suggested it. Maybe I mixed it with something else, it's been a while since I used it, sorry.
No, that's cool...but being open source isn't enough, since to replace github requires providing hosted services.
Yes that's whay I had in mind, wanted to do it myself since I have one server (VPS) that isn't doing anything really and is in London. The problem is the provider, Linode LLC, which is a USA registered company.
GitLab CE seems to be licensed under the terms of MIT license; I guess that's acceptable or?
GitLab is open source, you can host it yourself, so maybe the best solution would be creating a self hosted GitLab in a country that isn't subject to all this nonsense. I wish Linode weren't an American company.
AFAIU it has nothing to do with the location of the company, but with whether that company does business with the US.
So, all companies are affected. Only non-commercial stuff isn't.
Could this be because Github is now owned by Microsoft? Anyway I completely agree, ridiculous that common people like you and me suffer because the leaders of our countries don't like each other.
It's not just GitHub, We've had this issue with most US based tech giants.
It's all Trump's fault, he's extremely biased ... Saudi Arabia harbors and supports 10 times more terrorists than Iran ever did, while half Yemen is in ruin because of Saudi sponsored war, but all of that is okay with him as long as he can ship billions of USD on weapons sales to the Saudis.
Anything they do is okay apparently, including the worst human rights violations, because they're "friends" of the US. Europe/EU still wants to have normal relationships with Iran but it's made all but impossible by the US government.
Trump's got no brain, no common sense and no empathy, worst president ever, but I'm stating the obvious. This is probably the most political comment on dev.to ever, but I don't care, the truth must be told.
It's not even about trump, this drama predates trump or even bush. Paypal and other financial providers are blocking many countries under the excuse of human rights and political POV for last 2 decades.
That must be extremely annoying, I completely understand your frustration ... can't really understand that commercial companies are so biased for nonsensical reasons.
Yes. We already have a couple of Nexus, mostly on Universities, mirroring npm repos, docker hubs, python packages, distros repos. Please check a brief of our history meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/de...
This is terrible!
Is the ban/block based on your IP address? or the location field in your profile?
or something else?
I think that's the worst part, apparently it isn't IP/geolocation based because there is at least one guy who lives and works in Finland that got blocked: twitter.com/Farzad_YZ/status/11546...
His GitHub says he is in Helsinki as well, github.com/farskid
And it's a ban on your account, so even if you left Iran you wouldn't be unbanned.
It might be where you created your account.
It's probably the country of origin you defined where signing up. IP and nationality is very different and can't be relied on.
I don't think that terrorist organisations or governments would rely on public services like github.com, lol. Those news ring another bell.. about government regulation on the Internet. After this news, it must be pretty clear which laws you should respect if don't want problems with your international business. I'm sure we'll see more similar news in the near future.
Internet is becoming a political arena v3. I wouldn't be surprised in 10 years you'd need a visa to open a site that under US or EU jurisdiction [bad joke]
I also do not understand the ban sure there is important info that a state should not use and get to hurt other states but professionals can bypass that restriction anyway. So it hits only the poor people not the once intended to get hit.
After doing a 🌐search for open-source hosting I think that; You should consider Keybase - Wikipedia-link
keybase.io is providing an end to end encryption git hosting service and since it is entirely encrypted and also available via tor .onion the government shouldn't be able to see that you are located in a embargoed region!
Really uncomfortable position to be in 😔
"We have to pay the price just because governments and politicians don't get along."
Sadly this is often the very intention of sanctions. The idea is to punish the people of a country for putting in place and supporting a particular political regime. I suspect that the people on both sides of this argument could have done more about their respective governments. This is especially so in the USA which is supposed to be a model democracy.
I've just added my name and a
together/message to the repo. Thanks for the link! Sharing this.You might think, "what's the big deal?! there are many alternatives out there."
So what's wrong with that? It is part of US sanctions to terrorist countries. Change government to notterrorist and everything will be ok. Why would you use enemy's services?)
Come on! you suggest we ruining are life to use GitHub? right?
and do you think terrorist is that stupid to use GitHub as a repository? how naive you are, no the normal people use GitHub, and please stop call us terrorist, politics does mean who use better lies. so no one knows the true truth.
It is made not for restricting terrorist access to github. It is for common citizens, who doesn't do anything against terrorist government, which means they are ok with it, so support it. Enjoy and don't use enemy's services :)
I am not calling all Iran citizens terrorists. But if you do nothing against your governmebt, you support your government by inaction
It so happens that there is a technical solution to this that removes unreliable intermediaries like this.
This is just another result of "we aren't going to control your source anymore, but we'll control your infrastructure and data!"
I'm very sorry this sort of things happens to regular innocent persons. However, I fully support the US in sanctioning its enemies. These are dangerous times we live in. May there be a peaceful regime change in Iran very soon.
I guss you can access the feature of github in blocked country by changing ip address to some other country which have access to the full feature of github; Browsec VPN is one of the google extensions used for that.
Unfortunately the ban is at account level.
This is a heartbreaking situation. I am deeply concerned about open source content and services being censored this way.
I hope I'm not being insensitive to your plight in saying I think open source heavens like GitHub being acquired by corporations made it more politically visible to end up with results like this.
I hope to do whatever I can to voice your and my concerns and act against this restriction. This is completely against the philosophy of open source we fight for, and is also a huge breach of freedom of speech.
Thank you for fighting to bring this issue to light.
It's time to boycott Github, i will stop my premium account then move slowly to other alternative! time to move
I got shocked because this was something like war maneuver against freedom and the open-source world. and like always, we have to pay the price of stupid politics of our governments!
Seeing this is very bad, coding should be free from discrimination and sharing & hosting too. Github is the oldest and most used platform for both. Hope they listen and change their mind.
Sorry man, that genuinely SUCKS!
This is one reason why world should not rely on US and China based cloud services. And each country has to create its own cloud infrastructure, servers.
It's the government, github has to.
May ALLAH help you a lot. Its really very sad to know this.
Thanks for writing this. It needed to be said, and I understand your anger at the situation.
What do you expect my muslim friendo.