I'm from an older era, and it's continually bizarre to me that, apparently, nearly the entire collective hive mind of "tech" has forgotten that the point of Free and/or Open Source code is that you can spread it around everywhere and get it from different places.
Here on this forum, many people see employment in giant multinational corporations as something desirable. Many of them are primarily motivated by compensation. The site itself is affiliated with the tech startup culture, which every single government in the world has long recognized as important to the economy. And which they have tried to support to the best of their ability. In the world we are living in today, tech startups are probably the most conventional way of trying to get rich.
If you are looking for alternative subcultures, you should try something little less conventional.
the US government tells lots of people to do lots of things.
it told Phil Zimmerman to stop shipping PGP for a while. Debian and OpenBSD refused to do any crypto work in the US at all for like a decade because of this.
it arrested Dmitry Sklyarov for the crime of angering Adobe.
you're conflating "tech hive mind" with "most big tech companies are based in the US for tax/regulatory/staffing/VC reasons and so the US government will kill things that threaten it's goals".
Programmers have gotten so weirdly lazy.
There have always been "tech oriented" people who were iconoclastic anarchists.
In the early days, before CS curricula were as widespread and mature as they are now, a lot more people who knew how to program were self-taught, which self-selects for a much more independent type of person. For what I suspect were cultural reasons (but don't have solid data on), they were also much more likely to be the type of person who is on the fringes of society, in the counter-culture, or at least something of a social outcast.
I honestly doubt that the absolute number of anarchist- and libertarian-inclined "tech oriented" people has dropped since the '80s and '90s. It's just that there are now orders of magnitude more people who have some reasonable amount of tech understanding, many of whom are very much part of the mainstream and unwilling to put their comfortable lives at risk just to stick it to the man.
I'm mid-40s and I do some side contract work and game/Discord with late-20s/early 30's people and folks will be talking about something annoying or unjust, and I'm completely unjustifiably disappointed that no one ever even thinks to mention "hey, we could skirt the rules and just go full hacker on this."
(Note: no one ever do anything illegal, I'm more talking the sentiment than actually inciting naughtiness)
You certainly need not be in the "fringe" or a "social outcast" to object to this state of affairs, which seem to infringe on certain god given liberties (or so we were told). In fact many "dead white men" of excellent repute at the time were rather insistent on these rights. So if demanding our rights is now the condition of the "fringe", the inevitable conclusion is that we live in the gestate state of an emerging tyranny.
Actually I don't think they did, and if they had it'd be a First Amendment violation because the courts ruled that source code is protected speech.
clearly free speech is not an absolute right in the US, as evidenced by the endless court- and government-sanctioned infringements of it.
so, it's not surprising if another bit is, especially as abstruse as "why can't a company host source code that is enabling money laundering by North Korea"
> The Arms Export Control Act and the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (the ITAR regulatory scheme) required Bernstein to submit his ideas about cryptography to the government for review, to register as an arms dealer, and to apply for and obtain from the government a license to publish his ideas. Failure to do so would result in severe civil and criminal penalties.
> ...the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that software source code was speech protected by the First Amendment and that the government's regulations preventing its publication were unconstitutional.
Edit: I did a bit of googling and didn't find evidence that the government told GitHub to do this. Please link if you have evidence ty.
Per the register: "The Register has asked GitHub to clarify its actions or cite the US government order naming these developers as SDNs. We've not heard back."
This implies that they weren't told to do so by the government, but it's all speculation.