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Comment by ISL | Hacker News Reader

What is Aurelia? Why would it be sanctioned?

It looks like a JS frontend framework. I've never used it. I have no idea why it would be sanctioned. Bizarrely Aurelia 1.0 at https://github.com/aurelia/framework has a banner across its top indicating trade sanctions, but the new version Aurelia 2.0 doesn't https://github.com/aurelia/aurelia.

Aurelia's developers suspect it's because they have contributors from sanctioned countries. That's the first I've ever heard of such a thing. https://twitter.com/AureliaEffect/status/1240664151753551873

EDIT: And the banner is gone... Just when I was going to save some screenshots.

My first question is: how does Github know that certain committers are from sanctioned countries? Do they have Github profiles showing they're from sanctioned countries?

Given the number of huge FOSS projects on Github, it's feasible to imagine that many major repos have code contributed by people from sanctioned countries.

I have no idea what their motive is, but it smells really political to me. I could see Github's argument if they violated labor laws by hiring or contracting with individuals illegally, but that doesn't sound like what happened here.

> how does Github know that certain committers are from sanctioned countries? Do they have Github profiles showing they're from sanctioned countries?

Even if not in their profiles, you can pretty reliably detect a user's country from their IP address.

The author of the tweet says "A popular open source JavaScript framework with tens of thousands of customers worldwide. The project has been public for 5yrs+, managed by a US company, whose owner is even a GitHub Insider and long time open source leader (15+ yrs)."

First a disclaimer, this is pure speculation on my part, but based on what others have said about github cracking down on sanctioned countries. I'm guessing they audited and found some accounts that belonged to people they suspected of being from sanctioned countries, and then went massively overboard and nuked any repo those users ever contributed to.

I wonder if one could get repos nuked by making issues / signing in / forking / pushing commits through a VPN in Russia/Iran/etc

Now that github is enforcing this they probably block sanctioned countries at the network level.

https://github.com/aurelia

"A standards-based, front-end framework designed for high-performing, ambitious applications."

this is aurelia:

https://github.com/aurelia/aurelia#introduction

and this is the given reason for sanction:

"This repository has been archived with read-only access. Due to U.S. trade controls law restrictions, paid GitHub organization services have been restricted. For free organization accounts, you may have access to free GitHub public repository services (such as access to GitHub Pages and public repositories used for open source projects) for personal communications only, and not for commercial purposes. Please contact the organization admin and read about GitHub and Trade Controls for more information. "

https://github.blog/2019-09-12-global-software-collaboration...

A front-end framework I first used on a project about 4 years ago. I always hoped it would become as popular as Angular or React but it hasn’t picked up that much (I still have hope since I like it so much). Pretty strange that GH would have applied sanctions to it, even if it was a mistake.

if angular 1 had a opinionated love child with itself it would be called Aurelia.

an spa framework

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