GitHub starts blocking developers in countries facing US trade sanctions (ZDNet) [LWN.net]

GitHub starts blocking developers in countries facing US trade sanctions(ZDNet)

Posted Jul 27, 2019 15:56 UTC (Sat) by Lennie (subscriber, #49641) [Link]

So you Github is blocking a free service aka you aren't doing any trade. But still offering a paid product... aka doing trade ?

How does any of that make any sense ? it doesn't and I think the summary might be wrong/confusing.

Because the ZDNet article seems to be talking about people hosting stuff on Github.com:

"Users are responsible for ensuring that the content they develop and share on GitHub.com complies with the U.S. export control laws, including the EAR (Export Administration Regulations) and the US International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR)," GitHub says.

"The cloud-hosted service offering available at Github.com has not been designed to host data subject to the ITAR and does not currently offer the ability to restrict repository access by country. If you are looking to collaborate on ITAR- or other export-controlled data, we recommend you consider GitHub Enterprise Server, GitHub's on-premises offering."

GitHub starts blocking developers in countries facing US trade sanctions(ZDNet)

Posted Jul 27, 2019 16:03 UTC (Sat) by jmclnx (guest, #72456) [Link] (1 responses)

Quite: " paid-for on-premise software -- ..... -- may be an option"

That does not make sense to me. I would think the sanctions would want to block paid accounts, usually owned by commercial interests, the one most likely to cause pain. Blocking free accounts only harms regular people.

Anyway, MS probably has no choice but I do not see how blocking free accounts impacts trade. All it seems to do is force people to buy a service, increasing trade :)

GitHub starts blocking developers in countries facing US trade sanctions(ZDNet)

Posted Jul 27, 2019 16:40 UTC (Sat) by Anssi (subscriber, #52242) [Link]

I believe they mean that you can buy the on-premises solution in e.g. US and then have collaborators from sanctioned countries access that - so you are responsible for determining the legality, not GitHub.

GitHub starts blocking developers in countries facing US trade sanctions(ZDNet)

Posted Jul 27, 2019 17:15 UTC (Sat) by philipstorry (subscriber, #45926) [Link]

GitHub before being owned by Microsoft: "Sanctions? Sounds complicated. Let's just ignore that, and hope it never becomes an issue."

GitHub after being owned by Microsoft: "There's a guy on the phone, says he's from the legal department. Something about sanctions, and how stupid we are. He sounds quite upset. Also, do we have a legal department now?"

GitHub starts blocking developers in countries facing US trade sanctions(ZDNet)

Posted Jul 27, 2019 17:39 UTC (Sat) by zoobab (guest, #9945) [Link] (7 responses)

Remember Debian non-US?

https://wiki.debian.org/non-US

Why do the other users of the planet suffer from stupid laws from one country?

Github should move to Vancouver or any other country which do not have those trade sanctions against foreign nations.

Let's give them 30 days to do it, or we call for a good boycott.

By censoring those countries, Github is also harming the economy of those countries, as those companies cannot collaborate over Github with foreign ones.

And those countries need our help.

Not doing Github is playing Trump's game.

GitHub starts blocking developers in countries facing US trade sanctions(ZDNet)

Posted Jul 27, 2019 18:07 UTC (Sat) by aklaver (guest, #62352) [Link]

Huh?:
https://www.international.gc.ca/world-monde/international...

Look Iran and Ukraine.

For Ukraine:

"Canada has placed sanctions on the Russian-occupied Crimea region of Ukraine and on Ukrainian individuals and entities related to Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea and the ongoing Russian occupation in parts of eastern Ukraine."

Note: Page is undergoing maintenance 07/27/19 so it may not be fully available.

GitHub starts blocking developers in countries facing US trade sanctions(ZDNet)

Posted Jul 27, 2019 19:56 UTC (Sat) by xtifr (guest, #143) [Link] (4 responses)

This has been one of Github's key flaws since day one: a centralized system means a centralized point of attack. Which is why so many big FOSS projects are running their own instances of Gitlab or the like instead of going to Github.

What I hope we see from this is more projects moving off of Github. It was a bit of a bad idea to start with. (And, while I'm as close to neutral about Microsoft as I've ever been in my life these days, the fact that they now own Github does not increase the appeal of the system.)

GitHub starts blocking developers in countries facing US trade sanctions(ZDNet)

Posted Jul 28, 2019 18:04 UTC (Sun) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (3 responses)

On the other hand, if you are a small project (and most projects start small), Github and the like offer a way to concentrate on the code, instead of managing server infrastructure for co-operation and source distribution. So I would not call it a bad idea. What is needed is more "githubs" in different jurisdictions.

GitHub starts blocking developers in countries facing US trade sanctions(ZDNet)

Posted Jul 30, 2019 19:33 UTC (Tue) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (2 responses)

Theoretically a federated system could offer some of those advantages as well.

Realistically that doesn't seem to be how things typically work out.

GitHub starts blocking developers in countries facing US trade sanctions(ZDNet)

Posted Aug 1, 2019 2:12 UTC (Thu) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (1 responses)

Git already is a federated system. You can pull from GitHub and push to any other Git hosting service, and vice/versa, all using a common, freely available piece of software.

Perhaps you specifically meant the hosting software should be federated, but I'm having a really hard time visualizing what that even means in this context. Someone has to own the silicon. Someone has to pay for the internet hookup. You can do it "in the cloud," but that's even more centralized.

GitHub starts blocking developers in countries facing US trade sanctions(ZDNet)

Posted Aug 1, 2019 19:59 UTC (Thu) by emorrp1 (guest, #99512) [Link]

Well, there is work underway to federate the project forge layers above git too (started life a request to implement cross-server MRs in gitlab aka gitpub):

https://notabug.org/peers/forgefed/

GitHub starts blocking developers in countries facing US trade sanctions(ZDNet)

Posted Jul 27, 2019 20:54 UTC (Sat) by pkern (subscriber, #32883) [Link]

Traditionally the US also had a well understood export regime that was relatively easy to deal with. And then of course, they also have a tendency to come after you even when you are in a different country.

GitHub starts blocking developers in countries facing US trade sanctions(ZDNet)

Posted Jul 27, 2019 19:53 UTC (Sat) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (2 responses)

I don't understand what trade sanctions like these are supposed to accomplish besides hurting the victims of politicians. Would make more sense to target the countries at the root cause of the problem - for Crimea, sanction Russia; for Iran, sanction the US.

GitHub starts blocking developers in countries facing US trade sanctions(ZDNet)

Posted Jul 27, 2019 23:20 UTC (Sat) by mtaht (subscriber, #11087) [Link] (1 responses)

In other news china might drop plans for a new risc-v processor on github:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/07/27/alibaba_risc_v_c...

GitHub starts blocking developers in countries facing US trade sanctions(ZDNet)

Posted Jul 28, 2019 10:27 UTC (Sun) by zoobab (guest, #9945) [Link]

OT: @dave I just mirrored their Press release which was removed from their website:

http://www.zoobab.com/alibaba-unveils-most-powerful-risc-...

GitHub starts blocking developers in countries facing US trade sanctions(ZDNet)

Posted Jul 28, 2019 2:46 UTC (Sun) by Freeaqingme (guest, #103259) [Link] (8 responses)

Good thing Git is distributed. For the repository itself that should make an easy migration to a self-hosted Gitlab instance. Issues and such may be a bit more difficult, but surely there's existing scripts for that.

Eventually, society will learn that hosting everything with a single SaaS provider is far from ideal. Or maybe we'll never learn...

GitHub starts blocking developers in countries facing US trade sanctions(ZDNet)

Posted Jul 28, 2019 6:59 UTC (Sun) by zoobab (guest, #9945) [Link]

"Or maybe we'll never learn..."

Probably the most important thing is to learn from our mistakes.

GitHub starts blocking developers in countries facing US trade sanctions(ZDNet)

Posted Jul 29, 2019 10:56 UTC (Mon) by sm4rk0 (guest, #128167) [Link] (2 responses)

Issues shouldn't be an issue:
https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/import/github.html

GitHub starts blocking developers in countries facing US trade sanctions(ZDNet)

Posted Jul 29, 2019 14:31 UTC (Mon) by zoobab (guest, #9945) [Link] (1 responses)

Gitlab.com hosting is an issue, as they rely on Google Computing Platform, which is bound by US law:

https://about.gitlab.com/2018/07/19/gcp-move-update/

"NOTE to users in Crimea, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria: GitLab.com may not be accessible after the migration to Google. Google has informed us that there are legal restrictions that are imposed for those countries. See this U.S. Department of the Treasury link for more details. At this time, we can only recommend that you download your code or export relevant projects as a backup. See this issue for more discussion."

Let's implement cyberspace :-)

GitHub starts blocking developers in countries facing US trade sanctions(ZDNet)

Posted Jul 30, 2019 6:08 UTC (Tue) by buchanmilne (guest, #42315) [Link]

For the repository itself that should make an easy migration to a self-hosted Gitlab instance. Issues and such may be a bit more difficult, but surely there's existing scripts for that.
Issues shouldn't be an issue: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/import/github.html
Gitlab.com hosting is an issue

This thread is about self-hosted Gitlab instances, not gitlab.com Also, this documentation is in the ce documentation ( https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/user/project/import/github.html ), without any indicate that this is an EE-only (Enterprise Edition-only) feature, so seems to be available on CE (Community edition).

GitHub starts blocking developers in countries facing US trade sanctions(ZDNet)

Posted Aug 2, 2019 8:53 UTC (Fri) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (3 responses)

Git-the-dumb-VCS-datastructure is distributed. Good luck getting the *metadata* out of a Github repo and reusing it somewhere else.

History repeats itself and nothing is learned…

GitHub starts blocking developers in countries facing US trade sanctions(ZDNet)

Posted Aug 2, 2019 17:58 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

Easy: https://github.blog/2018-12-19-download-your-data/

GitHub starts blocking developers in countries facing US trade sanctions(ZDNet)

Posted Aug 8, 2019 17:18 UTC (Thu) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (1 responses)

Right, so you click the button and you now have a bunch of raw JSON that nothing else consumes. But at least you're not using GitHub any more!

That's *a* solution, but obviously not the one that's being asked for.

GitHub starts blocking developers in countries facing US trade sanctions(ZDNet)

Posted Aug 8, 2019 17:48 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

GitHub also has an API, so you can use that.