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Comment by intunderflow | Hacker News Reader

Russia looks set to remove trademark protection and has already removed patent protection from JetBrains (along with basically the entire west) - could be related to why now rather than earlier: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/03/09/russia-al...

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It's not about trademarks, patents or licenses. JetBrains made a public statement against the war in Ukraine, now they fear for the safety of the employees left in Russia.

Being in a rough neighborhood, "founded in Prague, Czech Republic, 22 years ago" their position about Russia's "special military operation" is more than the usual vapid posturing by entities with little or no skin in the game, but you would think they would have thought about their vulnerable employees still in Russia before publicizing that position. Makes me wonder what else they might do purely for "political" reasons; another reason I'll be sticking with my FOSS development tools.

> another reason I'll be sticking with my FOSS development tools.

Here is the repository for IntelliJ [1]. It has an Apache 2.0 license. That is - by any definition - FOSS.

It’s clear you have some form of agenda with “political reasons” mentioned. Why not stop being coy and spell it out?

[1]: https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community

While he was a bit of a bellend, Intellij Community is a faint shadow of what you get in the professional-grade tools which are closed source.

Why does that matter? I am personally happy that so much of what they make is free and OSS, and they are entitled to a business for other things too.

Given the recent many displays of Russian government incompetence, I doubt that they will connect the dots fast enough to repress people like them on an individual level (or at least I hope so). It seems they have plenty of actual protestors in the streets to arrest. Should keep them busy for a while. This could be, in fact, the best moment for JetBrains to act.

There are political risks to staying as well. They are quite a high profile company within Russia, the government could walk in and demand access to servers or cut them off from the internet in retaliation to the sanctions.

Are they? For a developer audience, sure. But I think there's a reason why they were considered "obscure" but past reporting regarding SolarWinds. They make amazing products, but developer tools aren't exactly a thing most people know about.

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