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Milad Nekofar
Milad Nekofar

Posted on • Updated on

Github Must Be a Free Platform

Github was a free platform for everyone since many years ago, but it has decided to restrict Iranian accounts.
We believe living in a country is not a choice that you have, but being a developer and contributing to the open-source community is a choice.
Github has restricted us from our freedom to contribute and being part of the open-source ecosystem because we are living in Iran.

Github blocked our private repositories without warning us, and now we have no access to our codes.

People should not be judged based on their living country. Github might decide to restrict a government, but it should not ban its active and loyal users without any prior caution.

I think having a simple Github page is a fundamental right for users.
Don't make us leave the open-source community.

GitHub logo 1995parham / github-do-not-ban-us

GitHub do not ban us from open source world 🇮🇷

A Message to GitHub

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Attention! We are so thankful for your support. This repository always shows that people are all together against unfortunate happening around the world As GitHub revised some of the previous restrictions, we decided to reduce this repository's activity. Of course, it does not mean that we agree with the sanctions and the GitHub We will post a conclusion and explain more soon, please wait for that The campaign will be terminated Thursday 1 August 23:59 (Tehran Time GMT +4:30). After this time we won't merge any new PR. Once again thanks for your support and kindness Please wait for our final conclusion

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Latest comments (69)

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peter279k profile image
peter279k • Edited

That's right, and I think the GitHub platform should not effected by the political issues.

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hyperpress profile image
John Teague

So the point that's overlooked is if you have repos on GitHub you have a backup of that repo as a Gift repo. That's how it works. GitHub has brought together more freely available software than any other service. There's a reason they're so popular.

The other issue is about GitHub and American company being forced to follow laws of the US.

I have never been a believer in economic sanctions. I have Iranian friend just as I have friends from other countries.And I hate these sanctions, but I don't blame GitHub for following the law, even the dumbest ones.

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darthwalsh profile image
Carl Walsh

Isn't gitlab.com already just the base software? It seems that most of these projects just need to move to a non-US GitLab instance.

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misagh90 profile image
Misagh Ghasemzadeh

Hosting companies, Slack & now the GitHub :(

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solarliner profile image
🇨🇵️ Nathan Graule

I think this can be the starting point for a true companion to Fit; one that is as decentralized as Git is. A project that has the likes of Mastodon, but for code sharing. Spin up instances for groups of repos and also general purpose ones. Should an instance go down for whatever reason, the others are still there.

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udiudi profile image
Udi

I wish a company with the size of Microsoft would've taken a stand against such measures.. this behavior doesn't promote dialog and peaceful way of living, very sad for you brother.
It isn't fair that several people in the US and Iran can cause these life altering crap for the masses =/

Sending love from Israel <3

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ssimontis profile image
Scott Simontis

It's the law. A stupid law, but it's still the law and when the US government enforces it; they don't really have a choice but to comply. Let's be careful about making this a constructive dialog; most of us in America are not proud of the way our government acts, ever. Offline backups and choice of a self-hosted platform could have prevented this.

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nekofar profile image
Milad Nekofar

I agree with you and thank you for your support. ❤️

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tallship profile image
Bradley D. Thornton

No, not at all - it's not a right, it's a privilege extended by a private, proprietary system (GitHub).

I feel your pain in losing access to your private repos, but best in mind that keeping anything in only one place defies the laws of redundancy.

What you might have done (and I realize that at this juncture that is woulda coulda shoulda) it's a little late to implement such redundancy, but you can easily mirror your GitHub and Gitlab.com repos on your own Gitea instances.

Gitlab is a service with free accounts just like GitHub, except that it's not proprietary software like GitHub's (they have a self-hosted community FOSS edition).

That gives you a convenient web frontend to git, and although you are correct that GitHub is still the defacto 'place' where people search for publicly archived projects, I fail to see the point in thinking it's, "the place" for private repos in anyway.

Most people out things up at GitHub so they can be found and have their repos mirrored elsewhere.

If you deploy a Gitea instance, you can also take advantage on Android of the Gitrex app which is available on F-Droid.

I hope that helps :)

.

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nekofar profile image
Milad Nekofar

Thanks for the explanation you gave. But unfortunately, this is not a simple issue that could be solved by a change in our hosting solution.

GitHub is a large part of the open-source community. Consider you are part of an international open-source project and you lost access to their repository.

This is what that happened to one of my fellow who works in the nuxt.js project.

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kungtotte profile image
Thomas Landin

How would changing your hosting not solve it? If the project is hosted on something that's not GitHub and outside US sanctions then all your contributors can access it just fine.

I'm not saying that moving the project is trivial, but it would solve the problems...

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prestongarno profile image
Preston

"but it has decided to restrict Iranian accounts."

No, it has not decided anything. International law is the cause, not GitHub. It's more than what you are saying.

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nekofar profile image
Milad Nekofar

In the sanctions laws, sanctions have been introduced that, if there is no financial transaction account, there is no problem and the server should not restrict access to your personal account. But as we can see GitHub decides to restrict all accounts.

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agronick profile image
Kyle Agronick

Theres a simple solution. Use a proxy. There's nothing Github can do.

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nekofar profile image
Milad Nekofar

It is not a simple IP restriction, they blocked every account that logged in from one of the sanctioned countries in the past year.

 
thefern profile image
Fernando B 🚀

I have gitea setup on a raspberry pi and works great.

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marvinschopf profile image
Marvin

Totally agree.

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hadigolkarian profile image
Hadi Golkarian

what's the point of limiting access to services like google cloud for a developer that knows how to change his ip address with a click of a button?
as a developer currently working from iran i have my vpn connection open all the time to bypass restrictions both from inside and outside. 😫

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thefern profile image
Fernando B 🚀

Based on the comments here tons of devs don't know about vpn or ip spoofing. Github has nothing to do with freedom as this post talks about. Is just politics and tradition restrictions laws which github has no control over.

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fsalehpour profile image
Faramarz Salehpour

Almost all of the Iranians use a VPN on a daily basis. GitHub has blocked Iranian users based on their nationality, not their location, so using a VPN doesn't solve the problem in this case.

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thefern profile image
Fernando B 🚀

yeah just read on the other comment about this, I know is difficult dealing with politics and all that, I don't follow none of it.

So no chances of bypassing, some other way? I can't remember but was nationality asked when the account was created?

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hkh12 profile image
Hosein Khansari

Being a dev in Iran is a sad story :(

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dploeger profile image
Dennis Ploeger • Edited

Ah well, yup. That's a really bad thing. I'm sorry.

However, decentralization doesn't actually work. I saw the same arguments after Microsoft bought GitHub and everybody envisioned a proprietary disaster (which didn't come btw) and with WhatsApp being bought by Facebook and everybody tried to switch to Threema and the like.

Decentralization just doesn't offer the comfort and inclusiveness as a central platform like GitHub.

As sad as this may be.

So only a central platform on a full open source base without financial bounds led by a elected flock of people would be the only thing working.

You might see some problems in that statement. 😉

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kungtotte profile image
Thomas Landin

Decentralisation worked fine back when every project self-hosted their VCS/webpage/mailing list/bugtracker/build servers...

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dploeger profile image
Dennis Ploeger

I wouldn't call that "fine". It was just like that back in the days but platforms like GitHub really gave open source projects and the complete community a major lift imho by providing visibility, simplicity and a lot of features that made organizing the projects a lot better.

And do we really want to go back to Bugzilla and mailing lists? Brrrr! 😉

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kungtotte profile image
Thomas Landin

There are other bugtrackers than bugzilla, and there are three providers of GitHub-like tooling that you can self-host anywhere (GitLab, Gogs, Gitea). No need to involve yourself with mailing lists if it's such a bother.

We've put too many eggs in the GitHub basket and we're paying the price now.

Imagine what happens when Rust crates are orphaned because of something like this, since they tied their infrastructure to GitHub.

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dploeger profile image
Dennis Ploeger

Or Homebrew.

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mohammadne profile image
mohammadne

It is Shuthub than GitHub.
Also I restricted yesterday.

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mohammadne profile image
mohammadne

Focus that many alternatives restricted Iranians people, for example Gitlab and...