FreeGameDev

Meanwhile, in the proprietary world ...

Sebastian Slomski {l Wrote}:@GitHubHelp , you blocked our entire company account after one employee opened his laptop while visiting is parents in Iran. We are completely blocked from deploying!

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1344 ... 76801.html

Can someone tl;dr me what GH has against Iran specifically and why are they doing this when it's probably not good for their business. Conspiracy theories welcome.

drummyfish {l Wrote}:Can someone tl;dr me what GH has against Iran specifically and why are they doing this when it's probably not good for their business. Conspiracy theories welcome.

There are US sanction towards Iran and a handful of other countries (Cuba, etc.).
Another reaon not to choose Github!

ffaf {l Wrote}:Another reason not to choose Github!

Yep! I think so, too.

Microsoft definitely sucks for free software developers.

Greetings
Peter

I think GitHub is the wrong actor to blame for imperialist U.S. sanctions. Blame the U.S. government and the rich people who control it. GitHub (and also GitLab, I should note) operates in the U.S., so it is required to follow U.S. laws, no matter how unjust.

EDIT: This is GitHub's page regarding its policies: https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-tea ... e-controls

On a side note, I think it's rather crass to make such a huge deal about some company suffering minor inconvenience from U.S. sanctions while saying nothing of the suffering caused for Iranians (and citizens of other sanctioned countries) by those same sanctions. This should be opening up a conversation about all the harm U.S. imperialism causes in the world, but instead, it's being made all about some company that ultimately will barely be impacted. I couldn't care less about some western company's temporary inconvenience. For Iranians, this is the norm, not because of the actions of GitHub or Microsoft, but because of the actions of the U.S. That's what we should be focusing on.

Well, sometimes the right thing happens for all the wrong reasons:
https://github.blog/2021-01-05-advancin ... e-in-iran/

Hahaha, that just makes them look even more ridiculous. That kind of change doesn't just happen in the course of a week, so clearly this is something that GitHub was working on already for the right reasons (they mention the process taking two years). They even mention that they're going to follow up with Syria and Crimea next.

I love it. GitHub does something genuinely altruistic, and people just dogpile them with hate because some western company was temporarily inconvenienced by a policy they didn't choose and which they happened to be actively working on fixing already. I think this should be taken as a lesson to be mindful of why things are happening, to direct blame at the party responsible (in this case, the U.S. government), and to direct primary sympathy at those the responsible action targets (in this case, actual citizens of Iran, Syria, Cuba, etc). A bunch of people throwing blame at GitHub, or developing unfounded conspiracy theories, is exactly what the U.S. government wants, because it distracts from the real issue.

Yeah, true. But this situation probably made it happen a bit faster and this is obviously their PR spin.

Edit: Although, I do think it serves as another lesson not to depend on an US cloud provider for important business or other processes. And the Iranians are probably better off not using too much Github anyways (not that it matters much in the larger picture of those sanctions).