28 ms·

So many dimensions come to play here. 1. There's the obvious legal aspect i.e. how these laws are framed and interpreted. 2. Then there's the geopolitical asp

So many dimensions come to play here. 1. There's the obvious legal aspect i.e. how these laws are framed and interpreted. 2. Then there's the geopolitical aspect. Is it fair to impose sanctions on Iran. 3. There's another aspect around GitHub policy that asks if an entire organization be banned for the location of one team member. 4. Finally, there's the aspect of relinquishing control. Your app development is on the cloud. IDEs are on the cloud. Deployments are on the cloud. App stores are on the cloud. You have relinquished so much control, why be surprised if that stares you back in the face? Ironically, Git is a decentralized version control system.

cies 6y ago
> Ironically, Git is a decentralized version control system. And Git is open source. Github is a US-registered company under MS. The US has a history of weaponizing its economic power. Stallman (RMS) was right once again.
- throwaway4good 6y ago
  But Github is reason why git is popular ...
  - jhasse 6y ago
    I doubt it.
    - richardwhiuk 6y ago
      There's definitely an argument that GitHub is one of the primary reasons that Git beat Mercurial.
      - ajsnigrutin 6y ago
        Yep! "One click" fork + "one click" pull request are its killer features.
      - dkersten 6y ago
        Anecdotally, I started using git because of projects on Github I wanted to contribute to. A number of others I know where in a similar boat. Before that, we used subversion, bazaar or mercurial. I personally am happy with having been pushed to using git and if it was winning anyway (not clear) I'm sure I would have eventually ended there anyway, but GitHub is the reason I started using it when I did.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - jhasse 6y ago
        I've used Mercurial. It sucks compared to Git. And not because I can't use it on GitHub.
        richardwhiuk 6y ago
        It's tricky to compare them now, because Git won, it's got a lot more investment. Ideally you'd need to care them just before Git got the upper hand - but that's hard to pinpoint.
  - owlmirror 6y ago
    Github sure contributed to the popularity, but I remeber distinctly as Git came out and how it took off like rocket. Git was a "killer app" from it's day of inception and everyone I knew switched their source control to it in late 2005 early 2006. It was a game changer to say the least. Github jumped on a already rolling bandwagon and left me ans many people I knew wondering why the hell you would need to host your projects there. (I am still a little bit puzzled but came to accept it as useful)
    - throwaway4good 6y ago
      Github fixes the problem that most users have with git (but are ashamed / too ignorant to admit): That it is de-centralized.
      - Pet_Ant 6y ago
        > Github fixes the problem that most users have with git (but are ashamed / too ignorant to admit): That it is de-centralized. Git is designed for an environment where there are multiple canonical trunks. RedHats kernel is equally a master as SuSe's. So you are maintaining various tips in a semi-synchronized manner. In most projects there is a single repository branch that is the true branch (with perhaps a few tags for LTR) that represents the project. For that reason a lot of Git's mechanisms are unneeded complexity. The killer features of Git is GitHub, and to a lesser degree local commits (after all, Mercurial has that too).
- x3c 6y ago
  This particular case was overreach by Github and not the US Lawmakers. https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-sanctions/faqs/118 https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-sanctions/... 118. I have a client that is in Iran to visit a relative. Do I need to restrict the account? A: No. As long as you are satisfied that the client is not ordinarily resident in Iran, then the account does not need to be restricted. See FAQ 37. Source: https://twitter.com/Hamed/status/1346433510786138114/photo/1 https://twitter.com/Hamed/status/1346433510786138114/photo/1
  - fennecfoxen 6y ago
    It may be overreach by GitHub, but given the severity of the sanctions lawmakers have set for if they happen to get it wrong, I'd like to at least blame lawmakers for creating such a risky situation.
    - A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
      I work with sanctions. I think both can be easily blamed. Similarly to DMCA notices, most companies opt to for the path of least resistance ( it is cheaper to blanket ban than to investigate ). Yes, politicians are to blame for creating the environment, but companies deserve flak for taking the path that is bad for the customer ( unless they are sufficiently well-heeled ). My thoughts are my own. I do not represent anyone other than myself.
      - fennecfoxen 6y ago
        So look at (one one hand) a customer worth... well, PureLabs is "10 incredible FTEs," let's give them the $21/user/mo Enterprise plan at $210/month in revenue. On the other hand, a sanctions violation could be a $65,000 fine (Trading with the Enemy Act) or $250,000 (International Emergency Economic Powers Act) for each offense. (I leave aside the million-dollar narcotics-kingpin act). On top of this we also see the risk of criminal prosecution. In what world is it reasonable to expect anyone to take this chance?
        6y ago
- elmo2you 6y ago
  I would go quite a step further than that. If this was not an unfortunate incident/mistake, then GitHub/Microsoft has become quite the active enforcer of US (legal) foreign policy. If they do that within the US market, that might be justifiable. But in this particular case, GitHub appears to enforce US foreign policy on what appears to be a company on the EU market. Also in what to me appears to be a rather ruthless, totalitarian, maybe even draconian way. I'm pretty certain that absent this US law within the EU market, this action is arbitrarily discriminatory, and very likely constitutes inflicting serious damage on another company without a legal basis (within the US, yes .. outside the US, no). GitHub may find itself stuck, between adhering to US laws and laws elsewhere (in this case EU, but China is probably a good example too). Still, is ultimately is a choice for GitHub to offer their products on multiple markets. If they have issues with that, they are free to exit a particular market. It certainly is never a valid excuse to start violating law in any market outside whatever country your headquarter might be located. Tangentially, this rather typical popular belief that US companies can simply absolve themselves from legal liability, just by crafting clever TOS/EULA that supposedly does just that, has always confused to me. It was always my understanding that you can not create contracts that violate laws. In most countries with a somewhat sane state of law, governments really do not like or tolerate when companies start essentially making their own law in parallel. But apparently you can rewrite (even basic) law in the USA, as long as you can somehow get both parties to agree on it. Be that by free will or coercion. Maybe it's time, for other parts of the world to no longer put up with this kind of bullshit, and demand that US companies actually adhere to the laws (and legal protections) that exist within their markets, or be free to buzz off and only operate on the US market alone. With US foreign policy becoming increasingly self-serving, legally dubious, and in some case downright insane, having internationally operating companies enforcing those policies is becoming a seriously risky proposition for anyone outside the USA.
  - mc32 6y ago
    ...” , this action is arbitrarily discriminatory, and very likely constitutes inflicting serious damage on another company without a legal basis...” Isn’t that what YouTube and FaceBook do day in day out when their influencers run afoul of policy?
- fibers 6y ago
  I'm not a pro dev by any means but what is stopping orgs from simply self hosting such a thing? Git is merely version control which supposedly does not take a lot of resources so you can go ahead and buy a dedicated server and host it in your office. Is the question more so about expanded services like CI/CD that may take up more computational resources to continuously build binaries and other deliverables?
  - sjagoe 6y ago
    I would say it's less about the compute resources, and more about possibly needing a team dedicated to maintaining quite a lot of infrastructure to replace the features that GitHub has, which is far more extensive than just git hosting.
    - turbinerneiter 6y ago
      GitLab, Gitea or others provide most, if not all, and in some cases even more features than GitHub. Theiy are fully or partially Open Source and they are easy to host. You need to compare the cost of self-hosting to the cost of SaaS - INCLUDING the risk of getting locked out. One downside of the SaaS model is that you are just a very small customer in the bigger scheme and they can't really justify spending money on servicing you. Let's say you are company of 5 people, paying 50 bucks a month for a service - how many hours per year can they spend on servicing you before you become a net-negative account? You much power do you have in a negotiation if you are a net-negative account?
      - kavalg 6y ago
        WRT self hosting, GitLab could be painful, but Gitea is really easy to host and keep up to date.
        risyachka 6y ago
        I've been self-hosting gitlab for few years now in my company and never had a problem.
chrisandchris 6y ago
So many reasons why I prefer on-prem over cloud for software that is directly attached to the value-chsin of the business. I wouldn‘t care if they cut me off of some backoffice app which manages the snack bar. But as a software company, my code is the heart of my company, so I would never give control of that to a 3rd party.
whack 6y ago
> You have relinquished so much control, why be surprised if that stares you back in the face? We live in a market-based economy with highly specialized division of labor. The idea of "keeping control" of all our necessities and dependencies, is an archaic one. The system generally works, because we create sensible laws that foster trust, vet for partners who are trustworthy, and name-and-shame entities that violate our trust. If you're a behemoth the size of FANG or a nation-state, maybe it is worth the effort needed to insulate yourself against these black-swan scenarios. But for a startup or small-medium-business that no one has heard of? That just sounds like bad prioritization. All of which is to say... we should absolutely be surprised when a vendor like GitHub blocks an entire company because of an employee logging in from Iran while on travel. And this surprise, and the resulting name-and-shame, is what keeps the wheels of our economy turning.
- Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
  There is plenty of solutions that are keeping the data in-house. Or allow for easy exporting/importing (github is not too bad in this regard though). None of these solutions go against the "highly specialized division of labor". This is a question about what kind of solutions we build, not how labor is divided or not.
  - dj_mc_merlin 6y ago
    None of those solutions are as plug-and-play as hosted GitHub/GitLab, nor without maintenance costs. Those add up to quite a bit of money too, usually making hosted the more cost effective option. Although this can happen, the truth is 99% of the time it doesn't, so most companies continue to use hosted solutions as it is far more likely they go bankrupt due to poor business rather than US embargos.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- pmontra 6y ago
  A customer of mine use GitHub, Travis and Slack. If GitHub is offline we can still setup a git server somewhere. I could offer my own for a quick startup. Mailing patches to each other, Linux kernel style, is not a viable backup plan. The cultural gap is too wide. If Travis is down we can run tests locally. We build the deployment artifact on one of our servers. If that one is down probably our production server is down too. If Slack is down, ah, I was on vacation yesterday. I guess the fastest backup for us would be WhatsApp Web.
dspillett 6y ago
> Ironically, Git is a decentralized version control system. GitHub is simultaneously not the be-all-and-end-all of Git[1] and more than Git[2]. If they have good backups of everything (if not they should consider this a beating with the ol' clue stick (I'm assuming everything on github can be backed up away from it?)) this should only be a bump in the road, though a considerably inconvenient bump as there is nothing they can just restore to and move on using without a pile of changes and/or admin work. [1] pick a new location for the "source of truth" repo for your team, push everything to that, and you're golden again [2] all the bits wrapped around it are available elsewhere, but not necessarily in a convenient ready-made integrated manner[3] [3] there is GitLab of course, not a direct 1-1 feature mapping in either direction but close enough for many, I'm told performance is more of an issue but you can always self-host if controlling that is worth the extra admin to you
- dkersten 6y ago
  > pick a new location for the "source of truth" repo for your team, push everything to that, and you're golden again Its also pretty easy to mirror your repo to other remotes. I've had projects that were in Gitlab, Github and Sourcehut at the same time. Sure, depending on how you sync them, there may be some steps (eg getting people to push their local branches to another remote) when your main one becomes inaccessible, but overall its really easy to work across multiple remotes. Its something git was designed for, after all.
INTPenis 6y ago
Yes it is in the cloud but if you use Gitlab you're suddenly compatible with hosting your own Gitlab. If you use Github you're not. Unless you pay tons of money for Github Enterprise. So there are Cloud services that make more sense to use in the long run, in this case Gitlab is one of them.
burade 6y ago
>2. Then there's the geopolitical aspect. Is it fair to impose sanctions on Iran. Yeah. Nobody else should be allowed to have nukes, or else the U.S. is gonna take his ball and go home.
- coredog64 6y ago
  Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. According to the treaty, they agreed to not pursue nuclear weapons and to allow IAEA oversight. Making it difficult for the IAEA to provide oversight is enough of a treaty violation, and that goes double when there is credible evidence that unauthorized enrichment was occurring.
  - literallycancer 6y ago
    Why do non-US companies care about US foreign policy goals? EU companies can benefit from doing business with Iran, on the other hand using US based SaaS only makes them hostages of the US government and provides zero additional benefit. It would seem that using US based SaaS is simply bad risk management on the buyer's part.
    - mcguire 6y ago
      The EU (and the UN) has had on-and-off sanctions against Iran for decades as well. Are any EU countries still dependant on Iranian oil supplies?
amaajemyfren 6y ago
Seems someone has responded to it. https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1346452935924846593 https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1346452935924846593
- stevehawk 6y ago
  lol someone responded a week later and possibly only because it made the front page on hacker news
  - harperlee 6y ago
    That “someone” is github’s CEO. It does not condone that it took an HN frontpage to react to a massive issue from a client blocked due to either a badly configured sanctions system, or a badly defined false positive determination workflow, that could not be expedited otherwise by the client, but... it’s something I guess. Good luck having a 7-day response by your bank, who have the legal obligation to not share with you why did they block you, or having Google’s CEO looking into your issue aired in twitter.
  - 13of40 6y ago
    Two things to consider: That guy is the corporate vice president for developer services, so he probably had to run that response by Legal before committing like that. Also unless this is a really exceptional year, there probably wasn't anyone "at work" at Microsoft last week except on-call rotations.
rapnie 6y ago
> Ironically, Git is a decentralized version control system. But git and github are not the same, as the latter contains a lot more extras in terms of functionality. There are good github alternatives, like https://gitea.io https://gitea.io And if you then talk decentralized version of that, ForgeFed comes into picture. See https://forgefed.peers.community https://forgefed.peers.community As it happens there's a recent interest to evaluate that for implementation in Gitea (and maybe funded by NGI0): https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/14186 https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/14186
- tamentis 6y ago
  We all know that, but we both know most Git repositories out there are probably on Github.
golemotron 6y ago
#4 should be #1.
2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
5. Github is bound to obey US law and international trade agreements. I think github is the last one at fault for this.
zoobab 6y ago
So called "decentralized", and only one company has a copy? "Decentralisation" of Git has been a running joke since the beginning.
jankotek 6y ago
Hell no! In this case Github is just unreliable piece of infrastructure. My phone provider bans me for receiving phone call from wrong country? Nice joke.

cies 6y ago

> Ironically, Git is a decentralized version control system. And Git is open source. Github is a US-registered company under MS. The US has a history of weaponizing its economic power. Stallman (RMS) was right once again.

throwaway4good 6y ago
But Github is reason why git is popular ...
- jhasse 6y ago
  I doubt it.
  - richardwhiuk 6y ago
    There's definitely an argument that GitHub is one of the primary reasons that Git beat Mercurial.
    - ajsnigrutin 6y ago
      Yep! "One click" fork + "one click" pull request are its killer features.
    - dkersten 6y ago
      Anecdotally, I started using git because of projects on Github I wanted to contribute to. A number of others I know where in a similar boat. Before that, we used subversion, bazaar or mercurial. I personally am happy with having been pushed to using git and if it was winning anyway (not clear) I'm sure I would have eventually ended there anyway, but GitHub is the reason I started using it when I did.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - jhasse 6y ago
      I've used Mercurial. It sucks compared to Git. And not because I can't use it on GitHub.
      - richardwhiuk 6y ago
        It's tricky to compare them now, because Git won, it's got a lot more investment. Ideally you'd need to care them just before Git got the upper hand - but that's hard to pinpoint.
- owlmirror 6y ago
  Github sure contributed to the popularity, but I remeber distinctly as Git came out and how it took off like rocket. Git was a "killer app" from it's day of inception and everyone I knew switched their source control to it in late 2005 early 2006. It was a game changer to say the least. Github jumped on a already rolling bandwagon and left me ans many people I knew wondering why the hell you would need to host your projects there. (I am still a little bit puzzled but came to accept it as useful)
  - throwaway4good 6y ago
    Github fixes the problem that most users have with git (but are ashamed / too ignorant to admit): That it is de-centralized.
    - Pet_Ant 6y ago
      > Github fixes the problem that most users have with git (but are ashamed / too ignorant to admit): That it is de-centralized. Git is designed for an environment where there are multiple canonical trunks. RedHats kernel is equally a master as SuSe's. So you are maintaining various tips in a semi-synchronized manner. In most projects there is a single repository branch that is the true branch (with perhaps a few tags for LTR) that represents the project. For that reason a lot of Git's mechanisms are unneeded complexity. The killer features of Git is GitHub, and to a lesser degree local commits (after all, Mercurial has that too).
x3c 6y ago
This particular case was overreach by Github and not the US Lawmakers. https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-sanctions/faqs/118 https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-sanctions/... 118. I have a client that is in Iran to visit a relative. Do I need to restrict the account? A: No. As long as you are satisfied that the client is not ordinarily resident in Iran, then the account does not need to be restricted. See FAQ 37. Source: https://twitter.com/Hamed/status/1346433510786138114/photo/1 https://twitter.com/Hamed/status/1346433510786138114/photo/1
- fennecfoxen 6y ago
  It may be overreach by GitHub, but given the severity of the sanctions lawmakers have set for if they happen to get it wrong, I'd like to at least blame lawmakers for creating such a risky situation.
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
    I work with sanctions. I think both can be easily blamed. Similarly to DMCA notices, most companies opt to for the path of least resistance ( it is cheaper to blanket ban than to investigate ). Yes, politicians are to blame for creating the environment, but companies deserve flak for taking the path that is bad for the customer ( unless they are sufficiently well-heeled ). My thoughts are my own. I do not represent anyone other than myself.
    - fennecfoxen 6y ago
      So look at (one one hand) a customer worth... well, PureLabs is "10 incredible FTEs," let's give them the $21/user/mo Enterprise plan at $210/month in revenue. On the other hand, a sanctions violation could be a $65,000 fine (Trading with the Enemy Act) or $250,000 (International Emergency Economic Powers Act) for each offense. (I leave aside the million-dollar narcotics-kingpin act). On top of this we also see the risk of criminal prosecution. In what world is it reasonable to expect anyone to take this chance?
      - 6y ago
elmo2you 6y ago
I would go quite a step further than that. If this was not an unfortunate incident/mistake, then GitHub/Microsoft has become quite the active enforcer of US (legal) foreign policy. If they do that within the US market, that might be justifiable. But in this particular case, GitHub appears to enforce US foreign policy on what appears to be a company on the EU market. Also in what to me appears to be a rather ruthless, totalitarian, maybe even draconian way. I'm pretty certain that absent this US law within the EU market, this action is arbitrarily discriminatory, and very likely constitutes inflicting serious damage on another company without a legal basis (within the US, yes .. outside the US, no). GitHub may find itself stuck, between adhering to US laws and laws elsewhere (in this case EU, but China is probably a good example too). Still, is ultimately is a choice for GitHub to offer their products on multiple markets. If they have issues with that, they are free to exit a particular market. It certainly is never a valid excuse to start violating law in any market outside whatever country your headquarter might be located. Tangentially, this rather typical popular belief that US companies can simply absolve themselves from legal liability, just by crafting clever TOS/EULA that supposedly does just that, has always confused to me. It was always my understanding that you can not create contracts that violate laws. In most countries with a somewhat sane state of law, governments really do not like or tolerate when companies start essentially making their own law in parallel. But apparently you can rewrite (even basic) law in the USA, as long as you can somehow get both parties to agree on it. Be that by free will or coercion. Maybe it's time, for other parts of the world to no longer put up with this kind of bullshit, and demand that US companies actually adhere to the laws (and legal protections) that exist within their markets, or be free to buzz off and only operate on the US market alone. With US foreign policy becoming increasingly self-serving, legally dubious, and in some case downright insane, having internationally operating companies enforcing those policies is becoming a seriously risky proposition for anyone outside the USA.
- mc32 6y ago
  ...” , this action is arbitrarily discriminatory, and very likely constitutes inflicting serious damage on another company without a legal basis...” Isn’t that what YouTube and FaceBook do day in day out when their influencers run afoul of policy?
fibers 6y ago
I'm not a pro dev by any means but what is stopping orgs from simply self hosting such a thing? Git is merely version control which supposedly does not take a lot of resources so you can go ahead and buy a dedicated server and host it in your office. Is the question more so about expanded services like CI/CD that may take up more computational resources to continuously build binaries and other deliverables?
- sjagoe 6y ago
  I would say it's less about the compute resources, and more about possibly needing a team dedicated to maintaining quite a lot of infrastructure to replace the features that GitHub has, which is far more extensive than just git hosting.
  - turbinerneiter 6y ago
    GitLab, Gitea or others provide most, if not all, and in some cases even more features than GitHub. Theiy are fully or partially Open Source and they are easy to host. You need to compare the cost of self-hosting to the cost of SaaS - INCLUDING the risk of getting locked out. One downside of the SaaS model is that you are just a very small customer in the bigger scheme and they can't really justify spending money on servicing you. Let's say you are company of 5 people, paying 50 bucks a month for a service - how many hours per year can they spend on servicing you before you become a net-negative account? You much power do you have in a negotiation if you are a net-negative account?
    - kavalg 6y ago
      WRT self hosting, GitLab could be painful, but Gitea is really easy to host and keep up to date.
      - risyachka 6y ago
        I've been self-hosting gitlab for few years now in my company and never had a problem.

chrisandchris 6y ago

So many reasons why I prefer on-prem over cloud for software that is directly attached to the value-chsin of the business. I wouldn‘t care if they cut me off of some backoffice app which manages the snack bar. But as a software company, my code is the heart of my company, so I would never give control of that to a 3rd party.

whack 6y ago

> You have relinquished so much control, why be surprised if that stares you back in the face? We live in a market-based economy with highly specialized division of labor. The idea of "keeping control" of all our necessities and dependencies, is an archaic one. The system generally works, because we create sensible laws that foster trust, vet for partners who are trustworthy, and name-and-shame entities that violate our trust. If you're a behemoth the size of FANG or a nation-state, maybe it is worth the effort needed to insulate yourself against these black-swan scenarios. But for a startup or small-medium-business that no one has heard of? That just sounds like bad prioritization. All of which is to say... we should absolutely be surprised when a vendor like GitHub blocks an entire company because of an employee logging in from Iran while on travel. And this surprise, and the resulting name-and-shame, is what keeps the wheels of our economy turning.

Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
There is plenty of solutions that are keeping the data in-house. Or allow for easy exporting/importing (github is not too bad in this regard though). None of these solutions go against the "highly specialized division of labor". This is a question about what kind of solutions we build, not how labor is divided or not.
- dj_mc_merlin 6y ago
  None of those solutions are as plug-and-play as hosted GitHub/GitLab, nor without maintenance costs. Those add up to quite a bit of money too, usually making hosted the more cost effective option. Although this can happen, the truth is 99% of the time it doesn't, so most companies continue to use hosted solutions as it is far more likely they go bankrupt due to poor business rather than US embargos.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
pmontra 6y ago
A customer of mine use GitHub, Travis and Slack. If GitHub is offline we can still setup a git server somewhere. I could offer my own for a quick startup. Mailing patches to each other, Linux kernel style, is not a viable backup plan. The cultural gap is too wide. If Travis is down we can run tests locally. We build the deployment artifact on one of our servers. If that one is down probably our production server is down too. If Slack is down, ah, I was on vacation yesterday. I guess the fastest backup for us would be WhatsApp Web.

dspillett 6y ago

> Ironically, Git is a decentralized version control system. GitHub is simultaneously not the be-all-and-end-all of Git[1] and more than Git[2]. If they have good backups of everything (if not they should consider this a beating with the ol' clue stick (I'm assuming everything on github can be backed up away from it?)) this should only be a bump in the road, though a considerably inconvenient bump as there is nothing they can just restore to and move on using without a pile of changes and/or admin work. [1] pick a new location for the "source of truth" repo for your team, push everything to that, and you're golden again [2] all the bits wrapped around it are available elsewhere, but not necessarily in a convenient ready-made integrated manner[3] [3] there is GitLab of course, not a direct 1-1 feature mapping in either direction but close enough for many, I'm told performance is more of an issue but you can always self-host if controlling that is worth the extra admin to you

dkersten 6y ago
> pick a new location for the "source of truth" repo for your team, push everything to that, and you're golden again Its also pretty easy to mirror your repo to other remotes. I've had projects that were in Gitlab, Github and Sourcehut at the same time. Sure, depending on how you sync them, there may be some steps (eg getting people to push their local branches to another remote) when your main one becomes inaccessible, but overall its really easy to work across multiple remotes. Its something git was designed for, after all.

INTPenis 6y ago

Yes it is in the cloud but if you use Gitlab you're suddenly compatible with hosting your own Gitlab. If you use Github you're not. Unless you pay tons of money for Github Enterprise. So there are Cloud services that make more sense to use in the long run, in this case Gitlab is one of them.

burade 6y ago

>2. Then there's the geopolitical aspect. Is it fair to impose sanctions on Iran. Yeah. Nobody else should be allowed to have nukes, or else the U.S. is gonna take his ball and go home.

coredog64 6y ago
Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. According to the treaty, they agreed to not pursue nuclear weapons and to allow IAEA oversight. Making it difficult for the IAEA to provide oversight is enough of a treaty violation, and that goes double when there is credible evidence that unauthorized enrichment was occurring.
- literallycancer 6y ago
  Why do non-US companies care about US foreign policy goals? EU companies can benefit from doing business with Iran, on the other hand using US based SaaS only makes them hostages of the US government and provides zero additional benefit. It would seem that using US based SaaS is simply bad risk management on the buyer's part.
  - mcguire 6y ago
    The EU (and the UN) has had on-and-off sanctions against Iran for decades as well. Are any EU countries still dependant on Iranian oil supplies?

amaajemyfren 6y ago

Seems someone has responded to it. https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1346452935924846593 https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1346452935924846593

stevehawk 6y ago
lol someone responded a week later and possibly only because it made the front page on hacker news
- harperlee 6y ago
  That “someone” is github’s CEO. It does not condone that it took an HN frontpage to react to a massive issue from a client blocked due to either a badly configured sanctions system, or a badly defined false positive determination workflow, that could not be expedited otherwise by the client, but... it’s something I guess. Good luck having a 7-day response by your bank, who have the legal obligation to not share with you why did they block you, or having Google’s CEO looking into your issue aired in twitter.
- 13of40 6y ago
  Two things to consider: That guy is the corporate vice president for developer services, so he probably had to run that response by Legal before committing like that. Also unless this is a really exceptional year, there probably wasn't anyone "at work" at Microsoft last week except on-call rotations.

rapnie 6y ago

> Ironically, Git is a decentralized version control system. But git and github are not the same, as the latter contains a lot more extras in terms of functionality. There are good github alternatives, like https://gitea.io https://gitea.io And if you then talk decentralized version of that, ForgeFed comes into picture. See https://forgefed.peers.community https://forgefed.peers.community As it happens there's a recent interest to evaluate that for implementation in Gitea (and maybe funded by NGI0): https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/14186 https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/14186

tamentis 6y ago
We all know that, but we both know most Git repositories out there are probably on Github.

golemotron 6y ago

#4 should be #1.

2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago

5. Github is bound to obey US law and international trade agreements. I think github is the last one at fault for this.

zoobab 6y ago

So called "decentralized", and only one company has a copy? "Decentralisation" of Git has been a running joke since the beginning.

jankotek 6y ago

Hell no! In this case Github is just unreliable piece of infrastructure. My phone provider bans me for receiving phone call from wrong country? Nice joke.