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Comment by akrulino | Hacker News Reader

Why would you call it either ignorant or baffling? Do you expect Iranian users to have a deep understanding of American export laws and the political intricacies that might follow from Microsoft's acquisition?

This is an completely understandable reaction regarding Github's block against Iranian accounts. Github as been around for over 10 years, and this never happened before.

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> Do you expect Iranian users to have a deep understanding of American export laws

No, but I expect them to at least understand ONE law, since the sanctions affect their country significantly and their politicians talk non-stop about it.

> might follow from Microsoft's acquisition?

This has nothing to do with MSFT. GitHub has always been a US-based company.

> Github as been around for over 10 years, and this never happened before

Because GitHub hadn't been following the law before.

I don't think it has anything to do with the Microsoft acquisition... GitHub was always a US owned and operated company. The reason this hasn't happened in the last 10 years and is happening now is that the laws regarding US companies doing business with Iranians has changed during that period of time. It's not GitHub's or Microsoft's fault, it's the fault of governments, the people running them, and the people empowering then.

Github owned by Github. But this is something different. It is Github owned by Microsoft. Acquisitions, in general, do not end well for the established user-base.

Suggestion: move you repositories! Host your own repositories! Use something different, like Gerrit, to spice up your development! Take matters in your own hand! Own your data, own your compute!

Is there something about this that I've missed that has something to do with the Microsoft acquisition? The same laws would have governed GitHub if they hadn't been acquired.

From an Open Source developer point of view, yes, of course. Open Source projects should not be hosted with them. Period. It completely betrays the spirit of the licenses the code is released under, which guarantees access to anyone, regardless of political, religious, etc.

It all depends on interpretation of the law, lobbying, stalling and the amount of bad press an actor can handle. Microsoft is a much older company and is likely to have stronger ties to the established government.

I'm not talking about understanding USA law, and couldn't care less. People, developers especially, should know something about the licenses they're using. Anyways, any company will have to comply with the law. I guess Microsoft in its war against Free Software managed to sow confusion. Free Software and Open Source are about licenses, not hosting services. How would they react, if for example, Microsoft/GitHub will stop hosting Open Source projects for free?

BTW, this is why I deleted my account at GitHub the day the purchase was announced.

War against open source? They’re the largest corporate contributor to open source, they’ve open sourced a ton of projects, including XAML and .NET Core (which is also now cross platform), and they joined the Open Source Initiative. If you honestly believe 2019 Microsoft is anti-open source, you’re living in the past.

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