Here's something you may never have to see in your lifetime:
This is not something new to me and many others. In fact these sort of discriminations have happened to me so much that I'm very sad to have gotten used to it. Let me catch you up on what's going on.
Update 1 - 28/7/19
It is now possible to make your private repositories public.
A few days ago, I received an email from GitHub which stated that my GitHub account has been restricted due to "Trade Control Laws Restrictions". Opening my GitHub profile, I found out that I can't access my private repositories. It also had stopped publishing my GitHub Pages sites. I was pretty upset and disappointed to see this happen again.
I understand that GitHub may be innocent and simply obligated to comply by the US government laws and regulations but here's the sad part, it's not the governments who suffer. It's us. We have to pay the price just because governments and politicians don't get along.
I do appreciate GitHub providing free private repository hosting for us, but I do believe it was absolutely unprofessional and unethical to block our access to our private assets without any prior notice.
You might think, "what's the big deal?! there are many alternatives out there." Yeah, I know but this is not what it's about. It's about being constantly overlooked and discriminated against and not being able to have the same right to access the tools and resources as your fellow DEVs. 😔
How would you feel like if you wake up tomorrow and see that @ben is blocking your access to this great community of amazing developers for a stupid reason?
Please make sure to checkout this repo for more information and see how you can help us.
1995parham
/
github-do-not-ban-us
GitHub do not ban us from open source world 🇮🇷
A Message to GitHub
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Attention! We are so thankful for your support. This repository always shows that people are all together against unfortunate happening around the world As GitHub revised some of the previous restrictions, we decided to reduce this repository's activity. Of course, it does not mean that we agree with the sanctions and the GitHub We will post a conclusion and explain more soon, please wait for that The campaign will be terminated Thursday 1 August 23:59 (Tehran Time GMT +4:30). After this time we won't merge any new PR. Once again thanks for your support and kindness Please wait for our final conclusion
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Latest comments (106)
After doing a 🌐search for open-source hosting I think that; You should consider Keybase - Wikipedia-link
keybase.io is providing an end to end encryption git hosting service and since it is entirely encrypted and also available via tor .onion the government shouldn't be able to see that you are located in a embargoed region!
Sorry man, that genuinely SUCKS!
What do you expect my muslim friendo.
This is a heartbreaking situation. I am deeply concerned about open source content and services being censored this way.
I hope I'm not being insensitive to your plight in saying I think open source heavens like GitHub being acquired by corporations made it more politically visible to end up with results like this.
I hope to do whatever I can to voice your and my concerns and act against this restriction. This is completely against the philosophy of open source we fight for, and is also a huge breach of freedom of speech.
Thank you for fighting to bring this issue to light.
Thanks for writing this. It needed to be said, and I understand your anger at the situation.
It so happens that there is a technical solution to this that removes unreliable intermediaries like this.
This is just another result of "we aren't going to control your source anymore, but we'll control your infrastructure and data!"
Seeing this is very bad, coding should be free from discrimination and sharing & hosting too. Github is the oldest and most used platform for both. Hope they listen and change their mind.
I also do not understand the ban sure there is important info that a state should not use and get to hurt other states but professionals can bypass that restriction anyway. So it hits only the poor people not the once intended to get hit.
Our governments are curses that will stick with us for eternity apparently. I feel you brother. Even though I fled my country Syria long time ago, lots of my friends are facing these troubles and we are sick trying to find alternatives.
Unfortunately, US based companies (GitHub) has no choice but to follow the governments punishments on some countries and ban their services there.
All this makes us really late in the internet evolution. I know we are miles away but I have hope in the coming 10 years (blockchain is going to change a lot of things)
Hopefully.
You might think, "what's the big deal?! there are many alternatives out there."
May ALLAH help you a lot. Its really very sad to know this.
It's the government, github has to.
I am a strong advocate of the
3-2-1 Rule of Backups, which is: At least three (3) backup copies total, in at least two (2) different formats (hard drive, optical media, thumb drive, etc.) with at least one (1) backup being stored off-premises, whatever that means for your specific situation (cloud storage/remote repo, at work/home/school, safety deposit box, etc.)As far as I am concerned, if it is not backed up 3-2-1 it might as well not exist at all, because when it's gone, it's gone.
The at least's in that formula strongly encourages doing more than the minimum, especially in whatever area(s) you feel might be the greatest risk, whether that be location, form, or just sheer number of copies, or all of the above.
Just make sure you develop a naming/version numbering system that allows you to quickly identify the latest copy of the resource, so you may be sure your backups are the latest versions (along with normal version control operations, in order to be able to restore some prior versions as needed as well.)
Any advice on how to automatically copy those repositories across several providers?
Having automatically up-to-date copies of whole repositories doesn't sound like anything fun to setup.
GitHub actions sound like something quite suitable for this
You know, I feel for you since I also come from a very difficult country as well, it's easy for others to tell us to "overthrow" our authoritarian governments/dictatorships and restore peace when it reality it's not as simple and the political actions taken by other countries to pressure them out will always end up affecting the population in one way or another.
Sometimes industries, without wanting to have to comply. I wouldn't take Github's actions personal at all, they're trying to stay inside the law. I'm sure this doesn't only affects the tech industry but also other ones.
Does it suck to be in the middle of the mess? oh yeah it does! but the best we can do is to accept and try to look for the positives and opportunities when a bad situation happens, because we can't control it and we can't change it. Is it a very cliche advice? probably, but it's the one that has kept me going these past few years.
Hopefully things get better over there soon <3
I think that UK does not impose those sanctions, could be worth investigating and hosting a GitLab on a server in UK.
I don't think the UK is in a much better position due to its close ties with the US.[1]
Some have suggested gitlab as an alternative, and I've seen they have attempted to make it easy to migrate from github, but wikipedia indicates they're also US based and so directly subject to the control of the US government.
Has someone come up a list of alternatives, with an indication of their exposure to the US government's decisions?
[1] Having said that, at least if you're a UK citizen, you have some influence with the decision makers. If you're not a US citizen, it is unreasonable to be subject to the decisions of the US government when you have no influence on them, so choosing services based elsewhere only makes sense (IMO). It reminds me of the phrase, 'no taxation without representation'.
GitLab CE seems to be licensed under the terms of MIT license; I guess that's acceptable or?
Well, I meant using them as a hosting service, like github, rather than using their s/w on my own servers. The latter would be ok, but isn't really a replacement for github.
I thought gitlab used to be open source before and available for download; that's why I suggested it. Maybe I mixed it with something else, it's been a while since I used it, sorry.
No, that's cool...but being open source isn't enough, since to replace github requires providing hosted services.
Yes that's whay I had in mind, wanted to do it myself since I have one server (VPS) that isn't doing anything really and is in London. The problem is the provider, Linode LLC, which is a USA registered company.
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