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Comment by silexia | Hacker News Reader

First, they are a Czech company. Second, they have taken a public and open stance against the war. https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2022/03/11/jetbrains-stateme...

They are Czech on paper, founders and most high level employees are Russian. Their main dev center used to be Sankt Petersburg, that's why Kotlin is named like that.

Most of the people I knew who used to sit in St Petersburg back in the day when I worked at JetBrains are now somewhere more western. They have a pretty significant office in Munich, for instance.

I don't know if their office in St Petersburg is still operating, since they claimed to stop sales and R&D activities in Russia: https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2022/03/11/jetbrains-stateme...

... making it even more impressive that they have taken a public stance against the war!

Absolutely. I'm still surprised that they are continuing with the business.

>Their main dev center used to be Sankt Petersburg

Is it still true? There were news of them selling their properties in St.Petersburg.

Their offices in Moscow (Capital of Russia. Largest city), Saint Petersburg (Second largest city in Russia) and Novosibirsk (Third largest city in Russia) were suspended indefinitely in March 2022[1]

[1] https://www.jetbrains.com/company/

They are moving out from Russia as fast as they can, but unfortunately it takes time.

i don't know how someone leaps from an IDE to putin.

how can you be sure some of the food you eat is not from russia, or made with russian fertilizer or some other russian derivative like gas.

maybe the car you drive was built by a russian, or maybe vscode itself has code from russians, who fully support putin.

fwiw i also dislike jetbrains, but nothing to do with russia or putin, nonsense.

This is PURE fud. They literally are from Eastern Europe, not Russia. They have spoken out against the war specifically against pitons actions on their blog.

They're Czech

I think it comes from the fact that their founders and high level execs are Russian and those chains are hard to break and people simply going to be suspicious during times of war. Especially with something as "basic" as an IDE that could potentially upload your source code to a Russian server. I'm personally not worried and think that would be found out rather quickly by security researchers and IT security wondering why spurious encrypted transactions are happening on weird ports to other countries. It's the same reason that governments have issued warnings about Kaspersky antivirus, although that one has root privileges on most machines that it runs on. Since a huge part of the source is closed it's hard to prove anything one way or another other than through detecting any suspicious activity.

According to the wikipedia [1], the company was founded in Prague by 3 Russian developers. Now you can say that those ties are hard to break, but another way to look at it is that the founders have (likely) been living abroad for 2+ decades and building a global company there.

They have publicly condemned Russia for attacking Ukraine and closed their Russian offices. They also suspended sales in Belarus. [2]

And closing offices here means letting go of developers (with possibly offering them the opportunity to relocate, of course) which sounds like a pretty hard decision to make both from the human and the business perspective.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JetBrains [2] https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2022/03/11/jetbrains-stateme...

russia isn't eastern europe?

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