During the Cold War, the primary thing that distinguished the US side from the USSR side was that, while speech by USSR people and people sympathetic to the USSR (like, say, CPUSA) was published in the US, publishing speech sympathetic to the US in the USSR would get you arrested.
It seems like the US has become what the USSR was: companies who publish speech from people in Iran or Crimea are now violating the law by doing so. Moreover, in cases like this one, already-published material is being destroyed, in a way that wasn't practical in the USSR, due to technological limitations (though they did try — famously Beria was airbrushed out of official photographs). The US doesn't yet have massive prison camp systems full of political dissidents — but then, for the first couple of decades, neither did the USSR.
This is a crucially important reason to move away from centralized and proprietary systems and onto decentralized, peer-to-peer, secure, free-software systems.
Learn from history.
(Edit: previously I gave Noam Chomsky as an example of someone sympathetic to the USSR, but that is at best debatable. The Communist Party USA, now in its 101st year, is a much clearer example, one that published continuously throughout the Cold War despite US prosecutions of its leadership.)
Surely you can see the difference between blocking someone from publishing Chomsky and forbidding US companies from "doing business" in those places.
Meanwhile for decades I remember many software EULAs saying things vaguely equivalent to "don't use this software in Cuba", etc. That is what I would compare this to.
Github is essentially a public library for computer code, but they happen to make money. I'm not sure I can see the difference between publishing and "doing business" in this case.
I don't know either, and I am no expert, but it sounds like Github/Microsoft lawyers may have decided it on one side or the other.
I put it in quotation marks because it is my laymen's understanding of what the sanctions are intended to cover. I could be wrong and the actual boundaries could be subject to debate and disagreement.
This has nothing to do with free speech - the sanctioned account was able to open an issue on GitHub complaining of the way their account had been handled. The account is the victim of a trade embargo, not a gag order.
Their Github Pages page was censored. They are unable to participate in the maintenance of an open source repository. This was done, according to Github, as a requirement to comply with the laws of its state.
If that's not a free speech issue, there are no free speech issues.
It was done as a requirement to comply with the laws of the United States[1] and insisting it's a free speech issue does not make it so. The United States government has no obligation to care about the collateral silencing of non-citizen speech in a foreign country subject to economic sanctions.
The government also has a mechanism where someone inadvertently impacted by sanctions can appeal to the Treasury Department and be granted an OFAC "license" that gives them permission to operate outside of the sanction(s). If the goal is to silence those who are subject to the sanctions that would be an odd way to do it.
> The United States government has no obligation to care about the collateral silencing of non-citizen speech in a foreign country subject to economic sanctions.
Although it may not have a legal obligation under the current menu of precedents, I disagree that it has no obligation tout court.
The real facts on the ground here are that a person's website was censored at the behest of the US Government. This is chilled speech. That the target happens not to be a US National, and also a national of a nation under sanction by the US government does not put it outside the realm of speech.
Not every issue where speech is limited is an issue of free speech. If you're told that you can not write on my house's wall, it's about speech, but not issue of free speech because it's my house and I decide who writes on it. If a mafia boss is imprisoned for ordering a contract murder, it's not issue of free speech, because even though the order was spoken, the murder is the crime that is punished, not speech. If you are not allowed to talk in the movie theater while movie is screening, it is not an issue of free speech - it's the issue of it being not the right place to speak. If there's a trade embargo that prohibits providing services to nationals of Elbonia and an Elbonian can't publish her speech - it's not the issue of free speech because the issue here is the embargo, not the speech. Having "speech" somewhere in the picture does not automatically makes it an issue of free speech. The same speech would be easily published if produced by anybody else. There's no issue with the content of the speech.
At a high level, the answer is something like "yes" - people who are not US Nationals who engage in protected speech in a region subject to police power of the United States have essentially the same protections as citizens or permanent residents.
At a lower level, the answer gets close to "no" - I suspect that, in cases like this, something in the ballpark of Kleindienst v. Mandel will be controlling in the eyes of SCOTUS, so no.
But even if this particular matter is not specifically regarded as protected speech under the 1st amendment by US Courts, it is still a free speech issue in general terms. This person's basic human right of expression has been abridged by the act of a foreign state and a spineless and compliant corporation.
Yes, but this is sort of the wrong question — the fact that the USSR did not have a First Amendment did not make their official censorship ethically correct.
You confuse trade war with censorship. I'll explain the difference. Censorship is based on content: if you can say "long live Communist Party" but can't say "long live Republican Party", that's censorship. Trade war is based on origin: if you are not allowed to do trade (business) or provide services to residents of certain place, regardless of the content or purpose, that's embargo.
> If that's not a free speech issue, there are no free speech issues.
There are plenty, when exclusion is based on the content. This is not one of them. That's why filing a First Amendment lawsuit against trade embargo wouldn't do you any good.
I'm fairly certain you could publish the kind of speech you are referencing in the US or any other nation with similar sanctions right now with no problems.
Yes, the situation of freedom of speech in Russia is very bad right now, though not nearly as bad as under Stalin. I'm not sure what the modern equivalent would be of the Communist Party USA's 1948 platform; maybe propaganda in support of Daesh or something?
Google doesn't have free speech, but the USA does. It is legal for a corporation not to have free speech, even if some may consider it morally questionable.
> It seems like the US has become what the USSR was
As somebody who actually lived in the USSR I call bullshit on this. There's a huge difference between arresting people for saying something the powers don't like and restricting business links to certain aggressive dictatorial regimes. True, many citizens of those regimes suffer twice - once because they live under a dictatorial regime and second time because of the effect of economic sanctions. And it is true that economic sanctions disrupt free flow of information and trade. They are a kind of warfare but one where people don't get killed - which is not good, all warfare is bad, but better than the other kind.
It is bad when there is a war between two countries. It is worse when the government wages war on its people, and that what happened in the USSR. It is nothing like what is happening in the US. Nowhere in the US you can be arrested or imprisoned for saying anything - including praising USSR, Russia, Putin, ayatollas, Hezbollah, whatever you like.
> The US doesn't yet have massive prison camp systems full of political dissidents
"Yet" is extremely disingenuous here - there's absolutely no indication US is anywhere close to have it, on the contrary, US has the strongest free speech laws among all developed countries, and the high courts consistently reject any attempt to change that. In fact, what I am hearing every day is how there's too much free speech and how it should be suppressed and restricted for my own good, lest I read something wrong and get offended.
> but then, for the first couple of decades, neither did the USSR.
Technically might be true, if you say reduce first couple of decades to first decade - Gulag started in 1929. But not because the bolsheviks were kind of heart - before, they just murdered whoever they considered the enemy of the people (or, in rare cases, kicked them out of the country). After Stalin came to power, he realized there's a lot of work to be done and he can't use the capitalist way of paying people for the work, and if he just keeps killing everybody there would be nobody left to do his grand projects. So he used the other way - put people in prison and force to work (of course, he still killed plenty but some were spared for prison camps). Even Soviet space program and nuclear program was done by people who were effectively prisoners (word to look for is "sharashka").
This is a bit off topic, so choose not to answer if you want, but can you link me evidence of Chomsky being a USSR sympathizer? From what I've read, he's a Libertarian Socialist primarily, which seems to be the opposite of the totalitarian regime that the Russians ran under the Soviet Union.
I may have overstated the case; certainly on many international conflicts between the two countries, he supported the same side the USSR did, which was often a totalitarian regime, but that isn't the same thing as supporting the USSR's own totalitarian regime.
Solovki in 1929 — or even 1939, after Stalin's first big purges — was a few thousand people. That does not amount to a "massive prison camp system full of political dissidents." You can easily find that many in the US today who are in jail for "resisting arrest" and "disorderly conduct" and such crimes against police-officer pride, and of course there are well-known controversial US concentration camps for political refugees attempting to exercise their right to seek asylum from persecution. (Not to mention the small number of people who remain imprisoned without due process in Guantánamo Bay.)
The "massive prison camp system full of political dissidents" I refer to was the GULAG system, which at times contained millions of people, slightly more even than the whole US prison system of today, of which a substantial fraction were suspected of nothing more than political disloyalty. But that didn't happen in ten or twenty years after the Russian Revolution. It took about a quarter century.
And more importantly, it was a system that was both theoretically and practically founded on political violence. It didn't take it a couple of decades to get there and its the expressions of violence weren't limited to prison camps. Politically motivated forced collectivization, for instance, ran concurrently and ended up being exterminatory.
I agree with everything you said here, PB, except for the first line. But even the end of the NEP and the ensuing Ukrainian famine took a decade after the Revolution to arrive.
I think you could consider the incarcerated victims of the drug war as political dissidents. The laws exist to make sure black people couldn't vote against Nixon, which I'd say is a political imprisonment
> It seems like the US has become what the USSR was: companies who publish speech from people in Iran or Crimea are now violating the law by doing so.
I think the intent is not that, and a company could probably argue that the law doesn't mean that because it probably can't mean that.
In this case though, AFAICT it's a restriction on use of private repositories, a feature considered to have commercial value, and thus subject to sanctions.
(P.S. I think your characterization of history is kinda wack [though I understand you can't write an essay before getting to the point], in ways that other commenters will point out in more detail)
I'm less worried about a capitalist democracy like the USA than the EU in this regard. The EU is an undemocratic construct where moralist positions far outweigh the EU's own interests, so it's much more like the USSR than the USA could ever be.
Are you serious? EU citizen here. US has a two party state (where one is deadpan centrist and the other right wing). EU has a whole host of political parties from far right to far left. It's the most diverse political landscape. That could potentially mean it's much more democratic than the US. I wish more US citizens cared more about the outside world than they did about their selves.
> In 1952, the Supreme Court upheld a lower-court decision in Adler v. Board of Education of New York, thus approving a law that allowed state loyalty review boards to fire teachers deemed "subversive".
It had certainly cooled down from outright McCarythism by 1960 but nobody wanted to be accused of Soviet sympathies back then...
You can be fired from many places for wrong kind of speech right now. That's not an issue of the USA, it's the issue of the employer. The government, as far as I know, did not mandate the firing, it only said that if somebody wanted to fire a teacher who is a fan of Joseph Stalin they don't have to let that person to indoctrinate their children but may let him go so he'd seek some other employment. And there was plenty of things supportive of USSR published in the US during the cold war.
My stepgrandmother was part of the Communist Party USA and continued distributing their newspapers and trying to recruit people until she died. I don't want to softpedal the human-rights abuses that happened in the US, but in fact even the Smith Act prosecutions only imprisoned a dozen people — there was nothing like the gulags in the US (until the War on Drugs, anyway), and it was not difficult to find out the Soviets' side of the story.
Yes. The overall numbers at present are broadly similar (2.2 million prisoners in the US at present, compared to 2.6 million at the peak of GULAG, though that was drawn from a smaller population), but US prisons have much lower death rates (especially compared to WWII-era GULAG — hopefully there will be no similar invasion of the US and so we will not have the opportunity to see if a wartime US massacres its prisoners in a similar fashion), and a smaller fraction of the prisoners are slave laborers (in GULAG it was nearly 100%).
Presumably if the US is beginning to institute Soviet-style censorship, it indicates a strong risk that prisoner numbers will go up and the treatment will get worse.
Have you? Find it very hard to believe that there's such a disproportionate number of criminals in the US.
China is locking up huge numbers of Muslims simply for having a religion and it still comes no where near the number of Americans incarcerated today without even having faced trial.
Which would you rather be in? A US prison with basic rights, healthcare, etc, or a Chinese labor/reeducation camp, or Soviet era Gulag? The systems are incomparable, whether or not the numbers are the comparable, which is what I was talking about. Yes, I've read the Gulag Archipeligo and watched several Solzhenitsyn interviews, and had relatives suffer through that era. Not close to the same thing. At all.
I'm from a US-friendly nation but I get terribly sad when I hear things like this.
Contribution to the free software world should transcend where someone is from whether it be China, Russia, Iran or whatever new "enemy" our leaders decide.
As much as I dislike Facebook for privacy related reasons, maybe it's time that more tech companies setup a Tor Hidden Service and not ask where people are from.
Could this be used to protect them against having to implement sanctions against various countries if they don't actually know where their users are from?
It would also make blocking those websites difficult by repressive regimes too. They could implement the ability to upload a private PGP key so email notifications can be encrypted end-to-end, Facebook also allows for this.
The impending bifurcation of the Internet is something that I hate to think of, but it seems something a lot of governments are hell bent on, particularly with their insistence on "backdoors in encryption". One country's back door will be another country's vulnerability.
Now I think I will go and and donate to Tor Project to make myself feel better.
Would that really change anything? I think what we’re seeing is the inevitable result of the internet and tech companies becoming the most important aspect of modern civilisation. We’re not a bunch of hippie geeks fooling around with open tech anymore while the political level largely ignores us. With almost everyone in the world using the internet for hours a day, regulation was simply bound to come.
Not knowing where your customers come from isn’t going to make the regulation go away, but it might make your entire company illegal.
It’s not something I think is good by the way, but the regulation and legislation is likely going to get more and more restrictive as our governments catch up.
> Would that really change anything? I think what we’re seeing is the inevitable result of the internet and tech companies becoming the most important aspect of modern civilisation.
I think what we are seeing is the implementation of authoritarian governments, something that has been on the increase nearly everywhere, in the last 20 years.
People have in the developed world had it, too good for too long. Complacency and populism is what led to this.
We voted in "strong leaders" and this is what we're gonna get, strong policies that might not really be all that smart.
What these policies forget is a lot of general citizens don't have much choice over the regime that leads them. They are just often people doing their thing.
Free software is actually something which brings us together, as it's about what we do and have in common, rather than race, religion or politics. I think that's why it feels so awful.
I’m Danish and in our very recent election we voted the authoritarians and populists out, by a large margin. Margrete Vestager is from a very liberal (as in free) Danish party, and she’s pushing some of the toughest regulations on big tech companies that we’ve seen in years.
So I’m not convinced it’s really authoritarian. We have a big scandal right now in Denmark, because a company secretly sold jet-fuel to Russians and that’s been illegal since sometime during the Cold War. Because other industries have been regulated on what they could trade with our “enemies” for decades. The tech sector somehow snuck under the radar on this, but that sneaking has certainly ended, and it’s now being regulated like any other industry.
I mean I could certainly be wrong, but I really do see it as governments being governments. When I was a child there weren’t seatbelts or airbags in cars. Automakers didn’t suddenly start putting them there because it was the right thing to do, or because it’s sell more cars. They did it because regulation forced them to do it and then they later turned safety into a marketing point.
> Margrete Vestager is from a very liberal (as in free) party, and she’s pushing some of the toughest regulations on big tech companies that we’ve seen in years.
Then it's the illusion of freedom. Free when they declare freedom, but not when they don't.
Code doesn't have color, race or politics. It is something that brings us together and we have common ground over. We argue over whether it is good code or bad code.
The fact is embargoes do nothing to benefit anyone here. All it results in is less code being available.
Also it is the very thought control, ie a Government telling me how I will make my code available that annoys me.
I didn't vote my government in, and I don't particularly like it when that Government tells me I cannot communicate, or express my intellectual creations with the people that I want, just because I was born within it's borders.
Only problem with your theory is that the number of fully-embargoed countries by the US has decreased over the last 20 years, and all of the still-embargoed countries except for Crimea have been on the list for longer than 20 years.
This is quibbling over terminology. Venezuela is in a deep depression caused by USA sanctions. Moving them from one list to another would make no difference to the daily experience of the average Venezuelan.
This lawyering also completely undercuts your original "nothing to see here; move along people!" argument.
US sanctions worsen the already bad economic situation but to claim the problem is caused by US sanctions is extremely misleading. We were already seeing severe shortages way before the 2014 sanctions (which were placed on individuals, anyway). The reasons are too complex to put in a short snippet.
Crimea and Venezuela are hard to compare. While there's the common point of having an authoritarian government, they're different in many other factors such as public support of the government, geography, pre-existing economy and timing and severity of the sanctions.
Though this is very true for both, I think:
> What these policies forget is a lot of general citizens don't have much choice over the regime that leads them. They are just often people doing their thing.
and from the POV of the authoritarian government on the sanctioned country it makes sense to double down upon receiving sanctions because the sanctioning country(ies) don't have a bigger stick than that (unless they resort to military aggression).
A (very bad) US bank of mine froze my account in a way which was exceptionally difficult to fix because I tried to use the mobile app to check my balance while physically in Ukraine (not anywhere near Crimea; they chose to fucking sanction the entire country because Ukraine got invaded, which was the opposite of the intent of the law).
They would be doing that to prevent money laundering, trying to stop people going to sanctioned places and transferring money around for the locals at hefty profit. (in other words, not the opposite of the intent of the law)
Most software is exportable to OFAC sanctioned companies under their rules.
In fact, it's possible to apply for an exemption to transact business with sanctioned countries. GitHub would probably have a good case for such an exemption and their parent company is already exempted to sell things like Microsoft Office to there.
I like Gitlab but that's not exactly what I have in mind, I think about something more similar to torrents. The problem with everyone having their own instance without discoverability & interoperability between them is that you lose most of the value of Github.
>I like Gitlab but that's not exactly what I have in mind, I think about something more similar to torrents
So everyone runs their own gitlab instance, and there's some sort of gitlab "tracker" that you can search through?
>without discoverability
What is this "discoverability" you speak of? If you want a library to do "foo", do you search up "foo" on github and look through the repositories? Is this better than searching up "foo" on google?
>& interoperability
The only "interoperability" I can think of is for pull requests, and I do agree that having to make an account on the instance and push to it to make a PR is a pain. This can easily be solved by allowing remote git repos to be used as PR sources, and using social sign in for account creation (so you don't need to create an account to create contribute).
Why do we always have a comment like this completely missing the point about Github? If git was synonymous of Github, Microsoft would not have spent 7 billion to buy it, there's a lot of features on top of git. And for me, whether it's a decision of the US government or Github does not matter much.
Maybe Microsoft missed the point of it! I don't use github. I use Amazon CodeCommit.
The fact is, github adds value because it isn't "decentralized". And any organization that runs something will have people that disagree with it and/or government regulations it will need to follow.
git, however, it nicely distributed and you can host a repo anywhere you want and be discoverable through other means.
> The fact is, github adds value because it isn't "decentralized"
Exactly. It's the most popular brand, same as Disney buying Hulu. Not to make Hulu into Disney, but to bring the customers into an arena for control. While I do not use github, npm does, for example.
You do still use Github if you have any popular dependency in your project, which you probably do. The point is that when it's decentralised, nobody would be able to take the repo down that easily or prevent someone access to public repo due to arbitrary rules.
Sadly, US companies are more and more unreliable, but not for technical reason, not for economical/business reasons, but for political reasons. Sadly, it looks, more and more, like "America First" will shift to "America Alone".
Hopefully, it will require other countries/organisations to build alternatives and not rely on the US. These new players will grow stronger, on their own market, building their success on US defiance. And might be someday US competitors (hello Baidu, Tencent and co.)
That makes the assumption that these alternatives would give up access to the US market in order to serve sanctioned markets like Crimea, North Korea, or Iran.
On my toy android app, I'm trying to avoid anything Google-licensed: replacing Maps by OSM for example. Just a small step... but a new mindset.
Problem is: today the US sanctionned some well-known "bad" actors (under UN scrutiny) but will sanction EU too... just because of business or strategical interest (and without any UN consensus).
sanctions like these only alienate (otherwise mostly pro-democracy) people from US/West.
Do impose sanctions on individuals who are associated with the rules of undemocratic regimes. But punishing whole populations (especially if they don’t have a democratic voice in the matter) is dumb and immoral.
This. The ruling class in the countries can still get the products and services they want. Can someone actually point to a case where broad sanctions like this has made a difference? Cuba has survived these sanctions for decades. When politians like Marco Rubio says the regime is about to break if we keep the pressure on, I just laugh.
It’s hard to prove causation, but South Africa only started making real progress towards ending apartheid after broad sanctions started getting passed.
the UK is especially disgusting in this. For example, Chelsea is still owned by Abramovich (a close Putin’s ally) who has no trouble traveling, buying property and otherwise enjoying what West has to offer. Tons of “Untied Russia” party members own property in Miami and London with no issues whatsoever
Well not sanction the country that got annexed for starters. If you are going to annex a whole country, which I am not advocating, then sanction Russia
I agree. Back during the cold war we used to run radio stations broadcasting into enemy territory to create sympathy and show that we are humans too. Today we seem to be doing the opposite.
According to Crimea and Russia and the basic facts on the ground, people living in Crimea are Russian citizens and have been for 5 years, Russia has poured billions into the region's infrastructure.
While it was definitely engineered by Russia doing things to violate the sovereignty of Ukraine
1) The US and all the powerful nations around the world do this kind of crap all the time and have a long history of it
2) It appears as though the people living in Crimea generally prefer being Russian to being Ukrainian, at least there doesn't seem to be any major opposition to the change.
3) Crimea was only part of Ukraine from 1992 to 2014, before that it was it's own entity under the umbrella of Russian empire or the USSR for hundreds of years
I'm not pro-Russia but I am pro-reality, and this sanctions game seems to be about highschool-level-bullshit between world leaders and nothing else. It certainly has made politicians on both sides much more popular with their bases as a result. Having "enemies" does that rallying well.
If you want to sanction Russia, do it over corruption, election meddling, or human rights abuses (although maybe put a higher priority on your own country's faults along those lines first so you have a platform to stand on)
I'm here feeling like Fangorn "I am not altogether on anybody's side, because nobody is altogether on my side"
Your point 3 is complete bullshit. Crimea was part of Russian empire since 1783. During that time Ukraine was also a part of Russian empire - mind you, not autonomic one. After empire collapse in USSR Crimea administratively belonged to Russian SFSR up to 1954, since when it was a part of Ukrainian SSR. So it’s a part of Ukraine for the last 60 years.
> people living in Crimea are Russian citizens and have been for 5 years
Russia pressured people, but they could refuse accepting citizenship (though those doing so get a lot of practical troubles there, up to persecution). They can't really force citizenship on unwilling people, despite trying.
are there any examples of people in Crimea having been persecuted because they refused to accept Russian citizenship and kept Ukrainian passports?
Crimea fell off the tree without single shot fired. that tells something. also, do not forget famous saying by Ukrainian nationalists - "Crimea will be Ukrainian territory or uninhabited":
Lot's. They are discriminated (like when looking for work or social benefits), intimidated and so on. Those who actively stand up against such intimidation are simply persecuted.
I'm sure HN will try throwing some shade here, but just about everyone has sanctioned Crimea, including Canada[1], the EU[2], and Ukraine itself. MasterCard, Visa, Discover, PayPal, etc., etc. also don't work in Crimea.
Because Crimea is a defacto Russian state now and for the most part a large portion of the population and the current government is participating in it.
The sanctions are for the most part per the request of the Ukrainian government.
If Catalonia becomes a separatist state tomorrow and Spain and its allies sanction it everyone in it will be under sanctions regardless of who or what they support.
This is what happens when your sanctions are geographical in nature.
No one has the capability to validate if a person in Crimea is a Russian supporter or not.
The idea behind the sanctions is in the end to make the life of the populous sufficiently difficult so they will rebel.
Or you could choose to become a citizen of a country you support instead.
I'm not saying "get out if you're not all in", I'm not trying to be dismissive. But your citizenship and temperament are accidents of your birth, and you have the power to rectify the former.
Or you're traveling internationally and you're in a bar and someone goes "Oh, you're American? Think you're a badass like Trump? Where's your gun, tough guy?"
I don't like what's going in Crimea either, and I support most sanctions against it, but I also don't understand why they should be excluded from open source software participation. On an idealogical basis I reject the idea of OSS being politicised. Otherwise, where do we stop?
Reality dictates that politics are inherent in human society. You are not above it, and neither is your hobby. Ignoring society is a privilege that never lasts.
Yeah I understand the reality of the situation, I probably shouldn't have said "I don't understand" in my comment. I just think it's a shame. I don't contribute to OSS, but I also think it's more than a "hobby". I'd rather see it as an international movement. I hope that one day the UN or something similar provides an equivalent service to Github without commercial interests. Even the UN is heavily politicised, but I don't like that the US alone gets to dictate what happens to some of the most important repositories of shared human technological knowledge when those repositories have been heavily contributed to by citizens of countries other than the US.
Very few people have listened when the minority raised alarms about so much "open source" development concentrated into one privately-owned closed-source service. You, and many others, have said you don't like the US government controlling this information, but people rarely seem to be interested in doing anything about it.
Nothing is stopping this person from sending email patches like they do in the Linux kernel project. No sanctions are involved in this person hosting a Git installation in Crimea that the rest of the world can access.
The problem isn't politics. The problem is that programmer culture currently conflates "access to Github" (which is a service run at the whims of an American defense contractor) with "free or open-source software" (which is a spectrum of opinions about copyright law). They are not related concepts, no matter what Github's marketing team has convinced the world.
"Open source" started in part as a political shift from the older free software movement. One justification was that companies were avoiding free software because they considered its ideological basis as incompatible with profit. Instead, "open source" focused on the development benefits, eg, others may find bugs and contribute code.
I therefore agree with the view that 'free software' is a social movement, while 'open source' is a development methodology.
> I noticed something interesting about open source software, which is this: most of the companies spending big money to develop open source software are doing it because it’s a good business strategy for them, not because they suddenly stopped believing in capitalism and fell in love with freedom-as-in-speech.
The free software movement is itself political - as are all social movements. For example, the emphasis on end-user freedoms related to copyright protection conflict with the emphasis on worker rights embodied in the Anti 996 License.
The Olympics and other athletic organizations support commercial activity, with many athletes coming to compete from sanctioned countries, where corporations benefit from the activity.
Seeing free/open source software in the same light ideologically is not that much of a leap. There is precedent.
Private commercial businesses do this, they fool you with their marketing and make you think that their product is also free and open source. Github's branding and marketing are to thank. And the blame also goes to us and other developers for not seeing this.
GitHub is a subsidiary of Microsoft, a US company with lucrative interests in the US government. While this does indeed stifle OSS activity for people in Crimea it isn't really about OSS.
Because US corporations and non-US corporations with major US operations tend not to want to risk it and comply with sanctions.
These sanctions tend not to be universal and some services can continue to be provided, however the price of violating said sanctions can be very severe.
I don’t know how many people who work at Github or PayPal especially senior management are willing to risk fines not to mention jail time for something as simple as some Russian officer buying a DVD on the internet while being stationed in Crimea or a local IT guy from the current pro-Russian government making a pull request.
> Why do they sanction Crimea (victim) instead of Russia?
Because Ukraine is pro-west and Crimea is pro-Russia. West good, Russia bad. Sanctions are black and white. The political situation is less-so:
The Crimea voted in a (illegal) referendum to rejoin Russia after a coup in Ukraine (also illegal, obviously) had replaced the elected but somewhat pro-Russian president with an unelected pro-European government.
While this revolution was popular with the west (funny how we support coups that overthrow elected governments when they go our way), it was unpopular in the south of Ukraine, which is mostly ethically Russian (the previous ethnic population having all been ‘relocated’).
Why are you referring to Crimea as a victim? Their desire to leave the Ukraine has been well-documented since the beginning. See this amusing article from 1994 in the NYT for an example [1]:
> A separatist candidate who wants Crimea to leave Ukraine and integrate with Russia won more than 70 percent of the vote today in run-off presidential elections, preliminary results showed. His victory sets the stage for a direct confrontation between Ukraine and Crimea, a Black Sea peninsula that is dominated by ethnic Russians.
Russia took Crimea illegally by force, but people of Crimea are hardly victims. Ultimately, the goal of sanctions is to signal that the US is not accepting Crimea as part of Russia. To allow US companies to operate in Crimea would legitimize the annexation. (And as far as the people go - I don't think anyone cares for the people, particularly.)
Russia would severely punish people who wants to be part of other country (not Russia). It is in both countries (Ukraine and Russia) constitution, that it is against the law to separate territory without country-wide voting.
But the discussion is not about what Russia or Ukraine would do, instead, it is about American companies punishing people living in a territory that is now separate from Ukraine.
Discussion is about US government which punishing Russian government by applying restrictions, US companies just follow the law, they don't have any other choice. When governments fight, people suffer.
I've never understood why this is true and considered ethical. If a part of your country wishes to govern themselves, or be governed by someone else, why should that be met with violence?
It is a complex system with many actors on different levels.
You can see it on several levels:
- People in power are interested to hold the power as long as they can, and that's why they suppress separatists movements
- Countries which allows such separations become weaker and don't survive, because separation is manipulatable process, and damage country's economy and power
- concept of ethics is very driven by government: they tell people that it is their land, and nobody can take it from them
That's an open-ended question :) If your goal is to keep the Ukraine whole, you generally punish the people whose desire to leave runs counter to that goal.
Maybe because people setting sanctions know that Crimea is not a victim, and most of its population supported joining Russia, and hope that making their life harder may reduce the support.
I don't support Crimea's situation because I'm not a fan of the Russian government, but to play devil's advocate, if Crimea were to be returned to Ukraine, wouldn't that then make Crimea a victim given it's not what its people desire? So the sanctions are in favour of making Crimea a victim?
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? You've been doing it a lot lately, unfortunately, and we're trying for better than that here. If you'd please review the site guidelines and take their spirit more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Just out of curiosity (not judging), what concrete observation makes you say Putin supports Duginism, as opposed to, say, Dugin said some things years ago that just now coincide with some recent news?
Because they don't want to allow Russia to use it as a port or for commerce; Russia has been trying to take the Crimea for commercial purposes for the last millenium or so. And because they don't have the guts to sanction all of Russia.
No, it just makes it a geopolitical reality that you have to somehow punish Russia when it mobilizes ground forces and forcibly annexes pieces of land. Don't forget that Russian-backed insurgents literally shot a passenger plane out of the sky[1].
I don't mean this to sound aggressive, but would you agree then with sanctioning the U.S. after its actual military shot down an Iranian passenger plane, inside Iranian waters [1].
Say what you will, the US government at least paid out to the victims (although never officially apologized). While Russia denies all involvement to this day and lawsuits are still ongoing.
It wasn’t a defense. Two terrible things happened (let’s assume both accidental). The US admitted Iran-655 was an “accident that resulted in a loss of life” and paid out ~$200k per victim. Russia pretends like MH-17 never happened. Who do you think has more of a moral high ground?
Not defending Russia, just saying the circumstances are a bit different. Iran-655 was downed by a US warship - clear from the outset and no space for argument, while MH-17 was downed by (most probably) Russian separatists with a mobile missiles system, which allows for a lot of deniability, and since they had the chance to deny it they went with it. The US didn't even have that luxury.
Have you actually been to Crimea? Because I had and still have lots of relatives there (I am originally from Ukraine). I have zero doubt that overwhelming majority of people there (easily over 70%) want to be with Russia instead of Ukraine
I think your numbers are probably correct. I don't happen to know another number: how many people in Chechnya would rather be independent than part of Russia. But it doesn't matter; the Russian government is very selective about how it applies the "right to self-determination".
The Russian government is likewise selective in its interpretation of the Budapest agreement (1994) [1], in which Russia guaranteed Ukraine's territorial integrity in return for Ukraine giving up nuclear weapons.
Edit: I incorrectly wrote "Bucharest agreement"; fixed it (thanks jotm)
But it doesn't matter; the Russian government is very selective about how it applies the "right to self-determination".
That's the crux of the issue I think. To be consistent you would surely have to support both Chechnya and Crimea having the right to self-determination - or neither having the right to self-determination.
EDIT: So let me ask you - do you support both, or neither?
Are you asking me? I would find it hard to be consistent: Kosovo, Abkhazia, Palestine, Chechnya, Crimea, so many choices to make, so many fine differences, so much tangled history.
I do (retrospectively) support the US decision in 1861 to prevent the Confederate states from seceding, despite the expressed will of the white, property-owning part of the local population, so there's that.
Russia is hardly unique in being selective in its support for the right of self-determination. The independence of Kosovo was illegal under international law, but supported by the United States and its allies. Most of those same countries are now sanctioning Russia for annexing Crimea, even though that was clearly the will of a large majority of Crimeans. Everyone is hypocritical about these matters.
Interestingly, Spain is somewhat consistent here: they don't recognize Kosovo, because they have their own separatist troubles in Catalonia.
The US has in fact sanctioned Russian officials associated with the annexation of Crimea. [1]
You might also spare some sympathy for those residents of Crimea who did not wish to join the Russian Federation, for example, many Crimean Tatars. Not only have they suffered the loss of access to github, they also have to contend with a campaign of political repression. [2]
I agree with the idea, but wonder if that really hurts the right people. People in Crimea get both annexed and punished on global market. Russia gets access to what it wanted and gets no real punishment.
"The Ukraine" is the traditional way of referring to the country/region, going back centuries. Many languages, including Ukrainian itself, have traditionally referred to the Ukraine using similar grammatical constructs.
The Ukrainian government requests that people stop putting "the" in front of the country's name, but it's difficult to force people to change the way they speak.
Would've been nice if we called it Ukrainia in English from then on. It would make sense with the conventions for transliterating cyrillic country names.
[Heh, this is also one of those "Best way to get a correct answer on the internet..." kind of situations. Oh well, live and learn.]
This is one of those threads that's going to be coopted as a way to flog arguments against either or both of the US or GitHub when the truth is almost certainly that it's just a mistake.
I'm aware of no US sanctions against Crimea. There are sanctions against Russia over the Crimean annexation, but those are targetted to specific industries (which certainly don't include some dude's open source game downloader) and in any case are not actually being enforced by the current administration for reasons that no one here wants to discuss.
They messed up. Or plausibly the author is actually not in Crimea or has some other undisclosed affiliation, I guess. But most likely they messed up and will fix it.
>The Crimea peninsula is now cut off from number of products and services, as US law forbids companies from providing services and exporting goods to the disputed territory.[0]
It seems like the US has become what the USSR was: companies who publish speech from people in Iran or Crimea are now violating the law by doing so. Moreover, in cases like this one, already-published material is being destroyed, in a way that wasn't practical in the USSR, due to technological limitations (though they did try — famously Beria was airbrushed out of official photographs). The US doesn't yet have massive prison camp systems full of political dissidents — but then, for the first couple of decades, neither did the USSR.
This is a crucially important reason to move away from centralized and proprietary systems and onto decentralized, peer-to-peer, secure, free-software systems.
Learn from history.
(Edit: previously I gave Noam Chomsky as an example of someone sympathetic to the USSR, but that is at best debatable. The Communist Party USA, now in its 101st year, is a much clearer example, one that published continuously throughout the Cold War despite US prosecutions of its leadership.)
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