>The “weaponization of open source” as Gerald Benischke calls it in his March 16 blog post is indiscriminate, and the collateral damage it causes damages the wo

>The “weaponization of open source” as Gerald Benischke calls it in his March 16 blog post is indiscriminate, and the collateral damage it causes damages the work of developers and operators solely because they have a Russia-assigned IP address. It harms peacemakers as much as the warmongers—even ethical hackers using a VPN to work against the invasion might become collateral damage. I think this is a weirdly bad argument. All the sanctions against Russia harm pretty much all Russians because they're in Russia even if they're peacemakers. That's just the price of using sanctions. You can absolutely apply that to open source - block all Russian IPs and say "Sorry, but we endorse the sanctions that our government has put on Russia, and we're going to boycott your country for that reason" - just the same way that hundreds of western countries have pulled their businesses out of China. Now they also make the argument that it's ineffective - that you're ruining your own codebase to try and make Russia suffer, but at the end of the day that's a judgement for the developer of the repo. It's also naive to think posting "anti-propaganda" in commit logs is in any way an effective way of circumventing censorship, at best you're just hoping that your obscurity prevents you being censored, but that's basically just playing by the censors rules.