Last year, GitHub, the world’s largest open-source hosting platform, abruptly updated its website to say that users’ accounts and projects could be subject to U.S. export control laws.
Meanwhile, a number of developers from Crimea, Russia, Iran and other countries have reported restrictions on their GitHub accounts.
GitHub has sparked criticism from programmers around the world.
Iranian developer Hamed Hamed also created a protest project called github-do-not-Ban-us, which has repeatedly topped the Github hot list.
However, Chinese users were not affected by the GitHub incident.
To no one’s surprise, GitHub’s rival, GitLab, soon attacked China.
On October 15, 2019, GitLab, the world’s second largest open-source hosting platform invested by Google, announced in a statement on its official website that the “Job Family Country Block” mechanism will be enabled for two positions with access to customer data.
“In line with common industry practice under the circumstances, no offers will be offered to Chinese and Russian citizens,” the statement said.
And employees with access to customer data cannot now move to China or Russia.
The statement said the two countries were “blocked” because any employee working in either country could disclose company information.
GitLab officials say that in the current geopolitical environment, they have come up with the most humane solution, and this is a common practice in the industry.
But after the announcement was made public, there was strong opposition from developers and even within GitLab.
“Such acts of discrimination are incompatible with our values today. It’s really sad.”
“Gitlab is racist,” said one Russian developer.
“It just shows how unqualified Gitlab’s senior management is.”
“This is really a disaster for Gitlab. There are many ways to improve your company’s IT security, but you have compromised Gitlab’s reputation by making the most unwise decision to put politics above Gitlab’s core values.”
Even GitLab’s own director of global risk and compliance sent a lengthy message of shock: “What’s going on? There’s no law against it, is there?”
She also described the policy as a contradiction in terms — Gitlab explicitly stated that it accepted customers and employees from any country not subject to U.S. laws (China and Russia were not among them), and now is implementing controls that affect employees for political reasons.
“Among the countries at high risk of information leaks is the United States itself (second in the world in terms of number of hackers, according to ABC News). Don’t we have to restrict workers from these countries, according to current logic?”
Is GitLab doing this for information security? Or “disguised sanctions” targeting individual countries for political reasons?
The answer is self-evident.
Ironically, when GitHub suddenly blocked the accounts of developers in Places like Iran, GitLab received a wave of praise for not blocking any accounts.
Now, GitLab is doing the same.
On October 14, a developer named Ahmad Haghighi blogged that on October 3, 2020, GitLab blocked access to Iran without any prior notice.
On October 8, several developers in the region had their accounts blocked and were not even allowed to access their projects.
Even if these developers later applied for temporary access, they could only export individual projects, and GitLab refused to unblock their accounts.
The developer added that GitLab is not the first platform to launch a ban on the region.
Currently, developers in the region have been blocked by GitHub, Docker, NPM, Google Developer, Android, AWS, Go, Kubernetes, etc.
As a result, the developer said he would not use any American software under the banner of “freedom” from now on.
“Free software is a joke when it comes to U.S. policy,” he said in the post.
The essence and focus of open source is acceptance, inclusiveness and development, seeking common ground while shelving differences, and mutual benefit.
Recently, such acts have intensified.
Faced with these endless blockades, there is little developers can do but feel helpless.
With this in mind, China has been building its own open source community in recent years.
On July 14, the Technology Development Department of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) announced the bidding results for the 2020 Open Source Hosting Platform Project.
The results showed that the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology chose Gitee to build “an independent, open source hosting platform for China”.
At this point, the Chinese source code hosting platform supported by the state has been identified, Gitee is also known as the Chinese version of GitHub netizens.
But compared to GitHub, all aspects of Gitee are still far behind.
Anyway, we should build our own platform. Hopefully, one day, we’ll see a better, more mature tech community.
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