Probably not. But the timing is strange to me

I don&#x27;t think GitHub successfully convinced OFAC to allow them to offer services in Iran in the intervening four hours between then and now.

Announced only 4 hours after responding to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25644056" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25644056</a>? That can&#x27;t be a coincidence.

&gt; CrimeaWhy would Crimea be sanctioned? It was annexed.That&#x27;s like sanctioning the citizens of Iraq for the 2003 US invasion and occupation...

GitHub still allows public repo access even in sanctioned locations like Syria and Crimea.

I&#x27;m in a first-world nation and I still have to use a VPN to access parts of the Internet like georestricted content on Netflix and YouTube...

I&#x27;m just guessing, but probably a VPN.

&gt; In fact many people who needed private repositories were already using GitLab because of the limitations of GitHub private repositories and its pricing.Today I learned how similar to Iranians I am.&gt; many accounts were blocked and had no further access to their private repositories and gists even if they used VPN after that.Can’t access with VPN? How?

Are there any obstacles to creating a github clone for Iran, outside of a viable business model? All these ghettoes of company private gitlabs are of no use to an Iranian software industry. Arguably it is even detrimental to Iran&#x27;s national security.Speaking of which [the industry], wtf? I left Tehran in 79, and I must tell you, AmirAli, that I fully expected Iran to be a software powerhouse by now (if not earlier), given the national propensities and talents, and the lack of an artificially imposed barrier to starting up an industrial&#x2F;technical sector, and fairly open access to technical literature. Can you shed light on this?

Access to public repositories was not blocked, so those who wanted to work with open source projects were unaffected. For a while after the GitHub block, many used GitLab. In fact many people who needed private repositories were already using GitLab because of the limitations of GitHub private repositories and its pricing. Also many companies in Iran are using a self-hosted GitLab. After recent blocking of Iranian accounts on GitHub and GitLab, even more companies started using self-hosted GitLab.The blocking of GitHub accounts was unexpected and presumably took into account the usage history, so many accounts were blocked and had no further access to their private repositories and gists even if they used VPN after that.GitLab was blocked in Iran after they migrated to GCP, but was accessible with VPN. A few month ago GitLab also started blocking some Iranian accounts, so our company moved all of its repositories to a self-hosted instance just to be safe.

Github being fully blocked never lasted more than a few days I believe. Nevertheless I imagine a lot of Chinese also use Gitee or the like. If a library or something like that is a really common dependency i&#x27;d imagine it would have a copy on such places.

Gists and other subdomains are still blocked, but the APEX is available.This is one of those cases where ECH would really make sense: the censor is forced to choose whether to pass TLS connections to an IP or not.

When the Great Firewall started blocking Github, there was a post on Reddit (iirc) saying Chinese devs basically had to abandon the profession and switch to other work—supposedly because so much development these days depends on libraries and frameworks that are on Github.Though, I recently learned that Taobao has a publicly-available mirror of npm packages.However, I&#x27;m also noticing more and more popular repositories with Chinese language, in the past couple of years—they gather plenty of stars presumably just due to the population size (can&#x27;t judge them on merit). I guess the GFW block was lifted and Github is popular for publishing software even for consumption in China.

VPN with kill switch on all devices and an address in mainland Russia in github profile. I know quite a few people who live in Crimea and do contract work for US companies, who are not disclosing their actual location to their employers.

Most people in Syria use VPN anyway because most of the tech tools are blocked, that includes everything hosted on GCP (including GitLab), Android docs, Bitbucket, SEO tools, not to mention cloud providers, just to name a few.Actually the next day after GitHub ban, I rolled out a GitLab instance on my server and opened it for free access and published it in Syrian devs groups, but it barely had a dozen active users after 6 months, and all from one company not individual contributors, so I had to turn it off.What I can say from my experience and how we as Syrians look at open source contributions is that we see it as our ticket to get a better chance in leaving Syria to a good job that allows us to start a new life. It&#x27;s not something we do as a hobby or for fun in our spare time, because we don&#x27;t really have spare time.Btw, it&#x27;s quite common to have Syrians working on projects for US and Europe and avoid sanctions by VPN and registering their business in Dubai. I know a Syrian company that is a GitHub and AWS partner.

&gt; We want every developer to be able to collaborate on GitHub, and we are working with the US government to secure similar licenses for developers in Crimea and Syria as well.I&#x27;m very interested in hearing about the experience of HN people from these regions in terms of open source collabs. Since Github has such a large presence, what are you all using instead?

&quot;We were working for two years to get this license.&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25648849" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25648849</a>

The press release says they&#x27;ve been working on this for a couple of years. It was not an overnight change.

Securing an embargo exemption is probably not something you do as a quick workaround to an issue making the rounds on social media.

They are probably trying to put out the fire started by that tweet. So not really in time.Edit: apparently this was a coincidence

Just in time, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25644056" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25644056</a>And any frivolity aside, well done to github, both for this and also with their developer defense fund against take downs. Whether you like them or not, these are very positive outcomes for devs.

They lobbied the government to give them a singular exemption to a law that interfered with their revenue generation. They didn&#x27;t help anyone else doing software business with Iranians. This is monopolistic behavior -- a company using its market-dominating power to carve out special rights for itself.

Seriously, well done GitHub! There aren&#x27;t many big companies that follow through to do the right thing. Great stuff.

Git is a distributed system, so even if you lose access there isn&#x27;t a huge data loss.

You make a good point, I&#x27;m surprised to see it downvoted.It&#x27;s always a risk to put IP in a bucket you may lose access to just because of politics.

I suspect to get the same level of availability and trust folks have in github 100% inside Iran using local hosting providers &#x2F; infrastructure is actually a bit difficult.I think it&#x27;s kinda hard to compete with the big boys with limited resources &#x2F; footprint even whit &#x2F; perhaps because of sanctions.

Right? Unless someone was actively squashing sites down, it doesn&#x27;t take much attach a CRUD to a directory of folders for git repos.

Does Iran not have it&#x27;s own version of online git service after such a long time? I imagine it&#x27;s not too difficult to set a barebone git hosting service up (without the hub functions, obviously).

Yes, as answered in another branch, it&#x27;s possible and reasonable to setup continuous &#x2F; daily backups, if you&#x27;re using a hosted Git service (Github or not). This will mitigate the risk of losing access to the code.It&#x27;s not advised for these Iranian developers to use any Github-specific features, such as issues, wiki, CI, because losing them will cause disruption &#x2F; knowledge loss.And then the reason to use Github specifically, instead of something else is quite low.

This is true for the source control aspects of Git, but not all of the project management aspects of GitHub.  (wikis, gists, gh-pages: yes. issues, pull requests: no)

Thankfully git is a distributed VCS. You just push the latest version somewhere else.

Laws change and there are also a bunch of other ways to get banned from your code on GH. And once that happens, you have nowhere to go.Much easier to migrate to a Gitlab instance. And they know this! Which is why it&#x27;s so fun to see Github dancing around these issues lately. Finally some healthy competition.I&#x27;d love to know how many times MS have tried to buy Gitlab. :D

On the other hand, hopefully the more contact Iranians have with the outside world, the more they will petition their government for peaceful relations with other countries. Obviously GitHub access isn&#x27;t going to make the difference, but rather lots of these kinds of things in aggregate.

That sounds great, but it&#x27;s a very fragile state of things.While it certainly makes lives of Iranian developers easier, it does not make it a good idea to put their code there: laws change, and quickly sometimes.

It wouldn&#x27;t help with sanctions. As I said in the blog:The US has long imposed broad sanctions on multiple countries, including Iran. These sanctions prohibit any US company from doing business with anyone in a sanctioned country. (These sanctions can also apply to non-US companies whose activities directly or indirectly involve the US, including merely having payments that flow through US banks or payment mechanisms like Visa.)

I&#x27;m not in the legal loop, but would it be beneficial to move to a different country or region? For example, the EU comes to mind. Would also give me peace of mind regarding my data.

I don&#x27;t think anyone would have expected this today, but good job GitHub.I honestly think that they&#x27;re trying their hardest to keep it open for everyone - they can&#x27;t ignore U.S. law as an organization of their scale, regardless of their views on issues like this and DMCA.Nat also stays constantly in the public eye and really makes it seem like he cares - which is what a modern CEO should do, in my opinion.

Speaking of fast responses, your response time on these comments is incredible!

Hey Nat, since you&#x27;re on the line here, can I ask for more details about how this process might apply to other software forges? Were you able to secure a general exception for your line of business, or is it specific to GitHub? If the latter, how difficult&#x2F;expensive was the process?Great work, by the way. Kudos as well for committing to a DMCA abuse fund.

I&#x27;m curious: what was the rationale for not talking about this at all until it was ready? It seems like &quot;we&#x27;re working on a possible solution&quot; would have been a good response to the many complaints about this.Was there some reason to believe that mentioning you were working towards this license would have a detrimental effect on the review process for that license?

They were taking their sweet time processing the application until today.

Thank you for everyone&#x27;s hard work in bringing open source to everyone.

I probably started too many stinks on the Microsoft yammer page related to this. Thanks for finally getting it done.

I still can&#x27;t access my company&#x27;s org private repos (a company incorporated in Hong Kong, with only European employees) because I opened my laptop in a hotel in Iran 3 months ago.

Thank you Nat. It is better that Github be fully available on other countries sanctioned by US like Syria, Venezuela, ...I am from Iran. unfortunately, we are prisoners of mullahs like peoples of other countries sanctioned by US that are prisoners of their dictatorship governments.

Pure coincidence. We were working for two years to get this license.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;fre5h&#x2F;DoctrineEnumBundle&#x2F;pull&#x2F;12#issuecomment-33023169" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;fre5h&#x2F;DoctrineEnumBundle&#x2F;pull&#x2F;12#issuecom...</a> this is a classic

Nat&#x27;s tweet in response to the other HN thread about a company getting locked out of their github because a developer opened their laptop in iran.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;natfriedman&#x2F;status&#x2F;1346453242499121155" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;natfriedman&#x2F;status&#x2F;1346453242499121155</a>Pretty fast to get this posted...

The cynic in me also thought this right away. Github is an American company, subject to American data request orders. Iran would be better off not using github for private repos.

I think downloaded public repos were never blocked.

Absolutely. The state department only relaxes a &quot;maximum pressure&quot; regime if they think there&#x27;s some way to spy or sabotage their stated enemies. However, this could still be a good thing for the Iranian people if for no other reason that they can download free and open source software.

Probably they said to the US government. &quot;What&#x27;s the point of blocking iranian developers if we can look into their code?&quot;

Probably because Porn in blocked in Iran. So Iranian first connect to Tor or a VPN which makes their IP western.

&gt; Young Iranians already made heavy use of the web in the early millenniumThey were are&#x2F;are prolific Iranian hacking groups too. I had the misfortune of having my small site defaced (in a drive-by) and Googled a string from the usual shout-out and found a lot of matches on similarly defaced sites. I counted that as evidence towards a robust Iranian underground hacking scene. This was way before APT &amp; state-level actors were in the public consciousness.

Once someone uses &quot;bereft&quot; casually and correctly in conversation, I decide their opinion is probably the correct one.Well done sir.

Your vision of Iranians not having internet access in that era is very misinformed, I’m afraid. Young Iranians already made heavy use of the web in the early millennium, though often through VPNs (which, as the other poster mentions, would have masked their actual country).As soon as Goodreads was launched in 2007, it swiftly attracted an enormous number of Iranian university students: they are one of the most active demographics on the site and they review all kinds of books since (with lax copyright laws and high literacy) translation of foreign literature flourishes in Iran. Does that sound like a people bereft of web access?

Probably it&#x27;s because porn is blocked and the average Iranian would search in Persian and not English, so possibly Google trends didn&#x27;t have the Persian terms.

As an Iranian who watched a lot of porn back home, it is not true. In 2006 it was limited speed though, and censored, so if I watched porn, I would have to be on VPN or proxy.The cause: Iran has free government run universities, so education is a big thing here. Go to Stanford EE department, you would be surprised by seeing that many Iranians.

I have an anecdote about Iranian internet access: years ago (2006 maybe) Google came out with a way to determine the top search terms by country. For the US and most countries it was what you would expect: porn, sports, movie and music stars.Now for Iran it was control theory, FPGA design, chemical engineering, etc.. I suspect only weapons designers had internet access. Maybe universities, but no porn? Not likely..So Google trends no longer shows porn or Iran.

Not Iranian but a very famous repo is the 996 repo <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;996icu&#x2F;996.ICU" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;996icu&#x2F;996.ICU</a> (&gt;250k stars) which advocates for Chinese Developers working a 996 schedule. Depending on where you look you can find a lot of political content on Github from all over the world.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mytakedotorg&#x2F;us-presidential-debates" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mytakedotorg&#x2F;us-presidential-debates</a>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dessalines&#x2F;essays&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;crash_course_socialism.md" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dessalines&#x2F;essays&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;crash_cours...</a>

Some examples can be found in their public record: 
 <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;github&#x2F;gov-takedowns" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;github&#x2F;gov-takedowns</a>

Examples? I&#x27;ve never come across anything heavily political, aside from maybe &quot;free software&quot; advocacy, which I assume isn&#x27;t something most governments find particularly threatening.

Give it time? Github was previously doing the &quot;censorship&quot; of Iranians... now that it&#x27;s available I expect we&#x27;ll see more of this kind of thing:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Censorship_of_GitHub" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Censorship_of_GitHub</a>

Don&#x27;t give them ideas!
Also, I haven&#x27;t seen a lot of political stuff related to Iran on Github.

If TOR and I2P are a thing in Iran, they block github if they like but people will find a way to access it.

You&#x27;re right about censorship. However most Iranians have a VPN installed on their phone and rarely gets trouble for doing so and speak freely but anonymously. Iran gov is actually a democratie quite more liberal than most western people think. Yes, there is censorship, unfair courts cases, corruption, and repression. Still we can see this in most of the countries, often in harden terms. Should we speak about Assange ?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Politics_of_Iran" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Politics_of_Iran</a>

I&#x27;m surprised Iran doesn&#x27;t block Github. There&#x27;s plenty of political content on Github - it makes a half-decent blogging platform for the technically inclined.

When someone sees a post that relates to something else they know about, they&#x27;re likely to post that too. No rigging required, just people being social as people do. :)

I don&#x27;t think soIn the general case, maybe a little bit, but mostly not. In the specific case, not.Baader-Meinhof is about an illusion of high frequency. This specific case (iran + github) is direct coincidence. The general case of the poster above (topics bubble up from multiple sources) is not, because topics can be demonstrated to follow patterns of relatedness (there is a term that I forget) and :. the frequency is not illusionary.Of course, that supposes the pattern noticed is the pattern that was genuinely in the articles. Baader-Meinhof will apply to anything the user misidentifies. I presume that the direct links between groups of articles (ie, the ones that caused them to be written or posted) are much more prominent than the &quot;background&quot; noise of links that the user will Baader-Meinhof.

Isn&#x27;t this Baader-Meinhof phenomenon[0]? You learn about (or give a good think to) something and then you start noticing it everywhere.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Frequency_illusion" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Frequency_illusion</a>

There&#x27;s so many things going on all the time, that there not being any coincidence of any kind is less probable than these kinds of coincidences examined individually. The world&#x27;s a great and bizarre place.

I recently corrected a misspelling of Nicolas Cages&#x27; birth name in the German wikipedia that had been there for 15 years. I could not find a single German-language source for correct spelling, because they all copied the error from either Wikipedia or each other.Then, I discovered the issue being mentioned on the discussion page two weeks earlier and never before.

We&#x27;ve seen something similar at work where 2 or 3 people will come across an obscure bug in our code all in the same week. When looking into the root cause it turned out that the bug was created 18 months ago. So for 18 months it went unnoticed and then multiple people come across it pretty much at the same time. This has happened a few times and the people who found the bug were working on different things so it&#x27;s not like they find it because they&#x27;re working in the same area.

(We detached this subthread from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25648849" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25648849</a>.)

Im not saying that this is not true(seriously no snark here at all) but its weird how things like this come together on the internet some times. Even on Hacker news, it seems that there have been times that topics bubble up from multiple sources. In the abstract it can seem rigged.

It&#x27;s not entirely the US. Unfortunately there&#x27;s other people in the region who really don&#x27;t want anyone being friends with Iran who we&#x27;d rather be friends with.Back when it looked like relations might thaw during Obama every big business was foaming at the mouth over the opportunity to make a buck selling things in a new market. There&#x27;s a lot of very powerful people who&#x27;s ideal vision of places like Iran, Cuba, North Korea, etc involves everyday citizens using their iPhones to daytrade on the American stock exchanges over a Verizon tower while driving their Chevrolet trucks, smoking Marlboros and wearing Nikes

As an Iranian, you&#x27;re quite uninformed here. The Islamic Republic does a lot of small-scale aggression (e.g., they just confiscated a Korean ship on free waters), and they lead many proxy militias. They also pursue nuclear weapons. Their handling of domestic affairs is also bullshit (e.g., they lured Amadnews&#x27;s reporter, Zam, to Iraq and then kidnapped and executed him.).

Iran just seized a South Korean oil tanker yesterday to give it civilian hostages as leverage in on going negotiations with South Korea, a country that has never engaged in any form of violence against Iran.

Well, Iran supporting North Korea, funneling arms and resources to terrorists, and launching missiles at us probably didn&#x27;t help. The EU disagreement is specifically with the harshness of the sanctions - they still believe Iran should be sanctioned, just not as harshly.

I mean Iran threatens every month or so to literally bomb Israel off the map. Some countries are okay with that kind of rhetoric. In general, the US is not.

The US is hardly the sole aggressor here. Iran has conducted many provocations against others, not least of which is directly contributing to destabilizing forces within other countries in the region and relentless pursuit of a nuclear weapons program.

&gt; Am I naive to still hope for more peace in the world?Worth noting that this is entirely the U.S. not wanting peace, not Iran, hence the EU disagrees with the sanctions regime.

We detached this subthread from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25648849" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25648849</a>.

Am I naive to still hope for more peace in the world? Establishing an inclusive developer community around the globe feels like a step into the right direction bringing developers closer together.
I imagine Being the CEO of an american high-tech company nowadays is also politically no easy task cause you get bound to a lot of restraints.
Anyways. Congratulations Nat for the effort you put in and your willingness to improve a little part of the world.

Crimea should stay under restrictions until the end of the occupation.

decentralization means that a foreign government can&#x27;t steal my bitcoin, not that my own government can&#x27;t.

This goes to show you that even though you might have &quot;technical&quot; solutions to control, e.g. decentralization, eventually policy control will win if your government is motivated enough.Take cryptocurrency for example. Yes it&#x27;s decentralized and the government can&#x27;t seize from the blockchain. Instead, all they have to do is ask &quot;Do you have crypto?&quot; and you answer truthfully or perjure yourself or risk worse consequences.Your government doesn&#x27;t need control over your technology. They have control over you. Technical and policy changes must go hand in hand. You can&#x27;t use one to solve the other.

Maybe give your government a taste of their own medicine: go to the streets and overthrow your evil, corrupt politicians.

I&#x27;m not sure how much is by law and how much is by executive order, but I believe that when Biden gets in, he could make some changes unilaterally.So, essentially this would be about advocating for change by the Biden administration. It wouldn&#x27;t be by voting (since the election is already done), but writing to your representative could help. Maybe there are advocacy groups that could use support?Advocating for changes is more likely to be effective with an administration that isn&#x27;t fundamentally opposed to them.

You can write a letter to your representative!

This should be higher up.Here&#x27;s my cynical take: the most effective way to lift the sanctions would be lobbying from US corporations. Lifting sanctions is probably profitable for every US business with a market in Iran, so if you work at a US corporation, lobby your boss!

&gt; Please, as a U.S. voter, I urge you to consider your support for stopping the sanctions.How can a US voter actually affect change? What options are available for us to vote for?

&gt;wish to appeal to the better natures of the right wingYou voted for the right wing last time you voted (I know because there are no one else to vote for). The Democrats are also right-wing, anti-Iran, pro-Israel, etc.

Note: the US has placed economic sanctions against Iran every single day for the last four decades - regardless of who was US president, or which party was in power.

Your comment breaks my heart, and I hate what my country is doing to Iran. Reactionaries started the problems in 1953, and they&#x27;re perpetuating and multiplying it today. Unfortunately for those of us who wish to appeal to the better natures of the right wing in the USA that support these sanctions, the cruelty is the point: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;ideas&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2018&#x2F;10&#x2F;the-cruelty-is-the-point&#x2F;572104&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;ideas&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2018&#x2F;10&#x2F;the-cruelt...</a>

A good start might be to contact your representatives, see what their thoughts on Iran are, and make your case. If they aren&#x27;t interested, check out the opposition.Other than that, I&#x27;m not sure.

OP is referring to voting in general, not in particular, as you&#x27;re asking.And unless you&#x27;re in Georgia this obviously has no bearing on current candidates.In general, the GOP, especially under Trump, have pursued the policy of sanctions against Iran at all costs. The Democrats have not.So the answer to your question is pretty obvious, don&#x27;t you think?

&gt; Please, as a U.S. voter, I urge you to consider your support for stopping the sanctions.What does this mean? Who should I vote for?

&gt; Now, Iranian people hate the Islamic Republic and would get rid of them if they could. But the Islamic Republic has no limits. They would shoot and kill and many as it takes.That&#x27;s the problem with dictatorships. The only way to purchase a democracy again is with a lot of blood. Hopefully you had some sort of 2A rights (probably not since they are first to go under dictatorship) or else you&#x27;ll be relying a lot on foreign provided weapons to break free in the future. Good luck, bad governments almost never &quot;natually&quot; become better over time. Power will continue to be consolidated.Basically your whole comment amounts to &quot;yes our government is evil, but we can&#x27;t do anything to change it without people dying, and we aren&#x27;t willing to do that so... just remove all the sanctions because people are suffering and it&#x27;s better to have an evil government prosper than to prevent it from prospering by making its citizens suffer&quot;That said, I don&#x27;t think Iranians should be barred from GitHub. Free exchange of ideas and code should be available universally.

Developing a nuclear bomb isn&#x27;t the same as developing an actually useful nuclear weapon: you still have to develop a rocket to deliver it somewhere else than your test site.

Honest question, if the sanctions are causing misery and the people basically have to choose between death and poverty, will it not just cause more resentment? Wouldn&#x27;t the people eventually become so angry at the Western World that they support Nuclear proliferation for, at best, defense&#x2F;power and, at worst, revenge?

I personally full supported Obama&#x27;s sanctions on Iran. They had a purpose (Stop Iran&#x27;s nuclear program) that made sense and was achievable.And they achieved it. All European countries and united nations and Obama administration confirmed that Iran was committed to the nuclear deal.Even current and former Israel generals wrote letters to show support for Obama&#x27;s deal with Iran which stopped Iranian nuclear program.What the current administration wants is much much more than that [0]. They are basically telling the Islamic Republic to shoot itself in the head. Or face sanctions.Of course they pick sanctions.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aljazeera.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;2018&#x2F;5&#x2F;21&#x2F;mike-pompeo-speech-what-are-the-12-demands-given-to-iran" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aljazeera.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;2018&#x2F;5&#x2F;21&#x2F;mike-pompeo-speech-...</a>

Canada has nuclear power, but I&#x27;m pretty sure Canada doesn&#x27;t have nuclear weapons.

Many countries have nuclear power plants without having weapons program, Turkey, South Africa, Japan, Many Eastern-Bloc countries.

&gt; Countries that have felt threatened ([...] Israel) have developed nuclear weapons.What evidence is there for this? At the time, Israel claimed that Egypt was trying to develop a nuclear bomb. However in his 1963 letter to Ben-Gurion, JFK says that American intelligence agencies had found no evidence of this and believed Egypt did not have facilities capable of it (unlike Israel.) To ny knowledge, in the decades since then, evidence of the alleged Egyptian bomb program has never surfaced.&gt; &quot;I can well appreciate your concern for developments in the UAR. But I see no present or imminent nuclear threat to Israel from there. I am assured that our intelligence on this question is good and that the Egyptians do not presently have any installation comparable to Dimona, nor any facilities potentially capable of nuclear weapons production. But, of course, if you have information that would support a contrary conclusion, I should like to receive it from you through Ambassador Barbour. We have the capacity to check it.&quot;-JFK, 1963<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org&#x2F;kennedy-letter-to-ben-gurion-regarding-visit-to-dimona" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org&#x2F;kennedy-letter-to-ben-g...</a>

Iran is not threatened, there is nobody that could invade them except the United States, and that would be unthinkable.Iran wants nuclear weapons to swing a heavier stick and threaten it&#x27;s neighbours.

This is misleading at best.Every country that has the ability to enrich uranium is 99% of the way there towards developing nuclear weapons.Iran feels threatened. Countries that have felt threatened (North Korea, India, Pakistan, Israel) have developed nuclear weapons.The sanctions are there as a deterrent to Iran having a Nuclear weapons program.Anyone who thinks it is possible for a country to have Nuclear power but not nuclear weapons is a fool.

&gt; I don&#x27;t know what else could be reasonably expected from US by all the other ME countries.Beside leaving them alone and let them live in peace without American influence? Hm hard to say.

&gt; The main goal of such sanctions is to Iranian government to not have resources for war and terrorism.Maybe against other countries, but they just end up using the resources they have to do that anyways... just against their own citizens. Sanctions are nothing more than using civilians with no choice as a pawn to force a revolution because we couldn&#x27;t do it ourselves. It&#x27;s kindof disgusting considering how many uninvolved bystanders turn into &quot;collateral damage&quot; in these situations.

&gt; The goal of the sanctions are to make people of Iran so miserable that they would go in streets and start a revolution.It&#x27;s not the only or even the main goal. The main goal of such sanctions is to Iranian government to not have resources for war and terrorism. And it seems that in this regard, these sanctions work just fine.I don&#x27;t know what else could be reasonably expected from US by all the other ME countries.

When has that worked? The same countries have been sanctioned over and over without successfully alleviating tense relations.Why would a government who doesn&#x27;t care about its population look at the suffering of those people and change course? Are we naive enough to believe that the Iranian elite aren&#x27;t circumventing these sanctions personally?Finally, why? Like, after hundreds of years of imperialism and political interference, I&#x27;ve yet to hear a compelling case to continue doing these things given they&#x27;ve done nothing but push us further away from each other and closer to a climate-crisis, dystopian nightmare.We need cooperation not blackmail.

There was a deal, it was working, and the US (well, Trump) unilaterally broke out of it (as usual). Your lame excuses really are disgusting.

I personally full supported Obama&#x27;s sanctions on Iran. They had a purpose (Stop Iran&#x27;s nuclear program) that made sense and was achievable.And they achieved it. All European countries and united nations and Obama administration confirmed that Iran was committed to the nuclear deal.Even current and former Israel generals wrote letters to show support for Obama&#x27;s deal with Iran which stopped Iranian nuclear program.What the current administration wants is much much more than nuclear concerns [0]. They are basically telling the Islamic Republic to shoot itself in the head. Or face sanctions.Of course they pick sanctions.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aljazeera.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;2018&#x2F;5&#x2F;21&#x2F;mike-pompeo-speech-what-are-the-12-demands-given-to-iran" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aljazeera.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;2018&#x2F;5&#x2F;21&#x2F;mike-pompeo-speech-...</a>

The goal of US foreign policy is world domination. The sanctions on Iran may well contribute to that goal. However, from the point of view of what&#x27;s good for mankind generally I&#x27;m not sure it wouldn&#x27;t be a good thing for Iran to have nuclear weapons. It would discourage other countries from attacking Iran and it would also give other countries an incentive not to destabilise Iran. There would, of course, be some obvious disadvantages - so it&#x27;s not an easy (hypothetical) decision - but Iran would probably be a safer and better custodian of nuclear weapons than at least one other country that already has them so I certainly don&#x27;t think it would be a terribly bad thing for Iran to join the club.

The sanctions are meant to put pressure on Iran to stop development of nuclear weapons. A regime change is not a likely consequence of sanctions, it&#x27;s much more likely that the Iranian government looks at the economic toll of it&#x27;s choice to pursue nuclear weapons development and decides to change course. Without a doubt these sanctions cause much misery - the bulk of it inflicted on everyday people who are not decision makers in the country. But allowing a country that regularly threatens to wipe other countries off the map to develop nuclear weapons stands to create orders of magnitude more misery than economic sanctions.

I know I&#x27;m out of my league here, but it seems to me like a good thing that we sanction countries would would hand out a 10+ year jail sentence to a instagrammer for showcasing their hobby?

Are US sanctions on Cuba really intended to impoverish Cuba? I would think not, because Canada, the EU and other developed countries continue to trade with Cuba (and send holidaymakers there) and it has been decades since the US tried to put any real pressure on its allies to isolate Cuba.Rather, I would suspect that the real aim of America’s Cuba policy is to appeal to the Cuban-exile demographic, which has a powerful lobby and can deliver votes to politicians in favor of the status quo.

&quot;the US has imposed sanctions on numerous countries since WWII and not in a single instance has it lead to a revolution in America&#x27;s favour.&quot;? US sanctions against Iran actually did lead to a &#x27;win&#x27; for the US in the first round.It&#x27;s the expansion of those sanctions that has caused problems.Sanctions on Russia have definitely had an effect [1]. It&#x27;s hard to say exactly, only Putin knows, it&#x27;s not like he&#x27;d admit it, but there&#x27;s no doubt it affects his calculus.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;International_sanctions_during_the_Ukrainian_crisis" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;International_sanctions_during...</a>

I see no reason to believe that US sanctions on Iran are intended to cause a revolt by the Iranian people. AFAIK, the US has imposed sanctions on numerous countries since WWII and not in a single instance has it lead to a revolution in America&#x27;s favour.Another possibility is that the US simply wants to isolate its geopolitical enemies and impoverish them. As it has been doing with Cuba since Batista was overthrown.I&#x27;m not convinced US foreign policy were rational, but a possible rational explanation for US sanctions is to make an example of countries that refuse US dominance. Similar to how a gang running a protection racket punishes those who refuse to pay protection money.Regardless of why US foreign policy has deemed it necessary to starve the Iranian people, it will not lead to a revolution in America&#x27;s favour. The Shah is not coming back. It will just lead to more death of Iranians.

You&#x27;re replying to a post describing the terrible effects of US sanctions on Iran. Imagine if you were living under those conditions, and person from the country enforcing the sanctions responded that there&#x27;s nothing they can do because their two party democracy makes it too hard to change anything?This is not the right place to complain about political gridlock in the US.

Unfortunately both parties on this are horribly bad. The Democrats just as bad as the Republicans. In their seal to not seem weak against the Republicans they have accepted the basic premises this foreign policy was developed.Unlike Saudi, Qatar, Israel, UAE and others Iran has no lobby in the US. Because there is are no commercial ties, US buissness don&#x27;t have existing relationships with Iran anymore.While US companies like Boeing certainty would like to establish such commercial relation with Iran. Their far bigger intensive is to continue to support the Saudi&#x2F;Israel vs Iran conflict and to sell massive amounts of weapons both to the US government and the governments of Saudi&#x2F;Israel and allies.Since there are no large factor to push the US a different direction the status quo has basically been established in the post 1979 world and things only changed minimally.There is not genuine democratic support for these changes, mostly because most people simply have no idea of middle east politics and don&#x27;t know the difference between Iran and Iraq or anything like that.There is a broad based anti-war movement from both the left and the right, but it has very little politician influence outside of the presidential elections. In the presidential elections generally the more anti-war presidents wins, but usually once in office, everybody around is not of that opinion. In congress election foreign policy is usually not important enough of a factor.Just considering that it was most Saudi bombers at the WW2 and the waste majority of issues and terror bombings have been by Sunnis has not changed the US political output in the least. Despite Iran actually reaching out to the US post-911 (threw the Swiss Embassy) putting a lot of issues up for debate but Bush categorically refused to even consider any engagement.Its really hard to see what strategically could change so this policy direction could change anytime soon.

&gt; Please, as a U.S. voter, I urge you to consider your support for stopping the sanctions.The US currently has a largely non-functioning government. Voting enacts little, if any, change. The two-party system currently in place has such ingrained lockstep change won&#x27;t happen because everyone is worried about not getting re-elected or seeing diversity of opinion.

This decision is proof of that. Microsoft can work to lobby the government to get access in Iran, but there&#x27;s no way 50 person shop in Mississippi could even hope to without a few tens of millions to throw away on lobbyists or special interests groups.

An overall negative view of democracy. If you actually pool people on most issues, the outcome of politics is not so far off from what people want.The reality is that people simply don&#x27;t care about Iran or know where it even is. Foreign policy issue outside of direct wars almost never dominate the political cycle.And even if they do on a presidential level, since only the president is relevant vote for a national level it impact is minimal. Congress elections usually don&#x27;t turn on foreign policy.

&gt; the truth is the US doesn&#x27;t treat us any betterThe parent stated &quot;But the Islamic Republic has no limits. They would shoot and kill and many as it takes.&quot; Parent also stated &quot;The government is also quite scared, and to make sure there wont be uprisings, is spreading fear. They execute people and hand cruel sentences to everyone. Last weeks they gave a 10 years sentence to an 18 years makeup artist who had a famous Instagram account. Journalists are executed, etc. People&#x27;s morale are completely shattered.&quot;You, and others, don&#x27;t have it better in the US? Really?I think you are trying to show empathy and I agree with most of your comment, but to me, you can&#x27;t empathize unless you&#x27;ve experienced it.And I don&#x27;t wish to demean experiences of some oppressed people in the US and their experiences (certainly the wrongfully convicted come to mind as a huge injustice), but your comment is not objectively accurate.

The US just voted for Biden who will probably have a different policy position than Trump and that&#x27;s part of the package.It works on some level.Also, it&#x27;s definitely the job of the US diplomatic corps to set out the strategy there because most plebes couldn&#x27;t find Iran on a map.It&#x27;d be nice to try to explain the policy better, but as I check in with TikTok for a few minutes now and again, I don&#x27;t think there&#x27;s much hope there.

I feel badly for you, however, there&#x27;s little evidence to suggest that we can change anything by voting. Mounting evidence suggest our &quot;democracy&quot; is a dog and pony show run by wealthy super villains, morally bankrupt politicians, and single-minded super-corporations.Our best bet is coalesce around each other, the working class, and build a better system of world governance.This will get downvoted but the truth is the US doesn&#x27;t treat us any better. Plenty of people are given harsh sentences for victimless-crimes. Property is protected at all costs. The system is pay-to-play. You either get in line or are ostracized.

Nice to hear from a Real Iranian instead of an American pretending.

As an Iranian living in Iran, I think you must educate yourself and do actual researches to find causes of things that happened between Iran and the U.S.Sanctions to produce &quot;maximum pressure&quot; as you said is still against human rights but oh well guess how UN thinks about that. Putting citizens in misery is not how you treat a government, specially an Iranian one. You are just going against basic human rights, like not being able to import medicines or basic needs of people.The only miserable person here is you, someone who claims to be Iranian and yet thinks giving access to private repositories on a platform is against his beliefs, let alone the way you talk about Iranian people also makes you disrespectful human being.Your hatred against the government has nothing to do with Iranian people, so please, think twice before you post anything on the internet again, if you can&#x27;t handle a simple thing like this, aka human rights, then you must have issues on giving opinions on other topics as well.Off-topic: seems like you&#x27;re one of those iranis who escaped the country for whatever the situation you were in and now you&#x27;ve got the tongue to speak out, so you start attacking on normal citizens because YOU think that YOU are better than them, there&#x27;s just too many of you, you&#x27;re not the only one.

Yes, why won&#x27;t Iran simply disarm under US pressure, like Gaddafi and Saddam did?

Iran does not need to develop nuclear weapons, nor fund regional militant and terrorist groups .. but they do. I wish the Iranian government would choose to be a good citizen of the region and the world, for the sake of their people.Ever since the revolution they took a purposefully antagonistic stance towards the US for their own ideological reasons. The sad reality (for Iran) is that the present global order has been created and maintained by US - so if you can&#x27;t get along with US, you are going to be a pariah. Many non-democratic nations can get along with US just fine - why can&#x27;t Iran?

&quot;Maximum Pressure campaign&#x27;s goal is to make people so miserable, they&#x27;d rather face bullets&#x2F;wars.&quot;No, Iran, including the &#x27;Regime&#x27; would actually be doing just fine if they dropped nuclear ambitions and stopped supporting the overthrow of Saudi Arabia.It&#x27;s an odd paradox, because even the Islamic Revolutionaries could be a quasi-ally of the US if they really wanted to. The US cares about security, predictability, trade and cooperation between state actors first, internal issues second.&quot; the maximum pressure campaign has rendered Iranian people completely miserable&quot; - the Iranian government has rendered people miserable. Stop blaming the US for the bad behaviour of the regime.Maybe we can have &#x27;GitHub Diplomacy&#x27; ...

Github situation aside, as an Iranian (living in the US) I would like to use the opportunity to raise some awareness regarding Iranian sanctions by the US government.The US sanctions are part of a &quot;maximum pressure&quot; campaign on the Iranian government. The US government has banned the rest of the world from dealing with Iran. Therefore, Iran has no exports anymore.As a result, Iran&#x27;s currency lost it&#x27;s value ~10 times in the past decade (When the original sanctions where started by the Obama administration).The goal of the sanctions are to make people of Iran so miserable that they would go in streets and start a revolution. Now, Iranian people hate the Islamic Republic and would get rid of them if they could. But the Islamic Republic has no limits. They would shoot and kill and many as it takes.Another challenge for Iranian people and a revolution, except for Islamic regime&#x27;s cruelty is an unknown future. Iran shares a lot of border with Afghanistan and Pakistan. Iran also has many terrorist groups activated inside it already. That means there are real fears of Isis&#x2F;Taliban&#x2F;Other groups rushing to Iran if the central government is weakened.So people are scared of Islamic Republic, and also scare of what can come next.Therefore, basically, Maximum Pressure campaign&#x27;s goal is to make people so miserable, they&#x27;d rather face bullets&#x2F;wars.This has lead to some really devastating results. Middle class doesn&#x27;t exist anymore. Some rural cities are reporting that people cannot pay for bread anymore. Most people cannot pay for chicken&#x2F;meat anymore. Add Covid 19 to this, and a very incompetent and cruel government which has been rendered completely useless by the sanctions, and you get a complete disaster on your hand.The government is also quite scared, and to make sure there wont be uprisings, is spreading fear. They execute people and hand cruel sentences to everyone. Last weeks they gave a 10 years sentence to an 18 years makeup artist who had a famous Instagram account. Journalists are executed, etc. People&#x27;s morale are completely shattered.So the bottom line is, the maximum pressure campaign has rendered Iranian people completely miserable. Even if it were to succeed wit topping Islamic Republic, there is no guarantee that it wont make Iran another Syria situation. Please, as a U.S. voter, I urge you to consider your support for stopping the sanctions.

We&#x27;ve taken the corporate press release flair out of the title above.

Why is it advancing? Isnt it just giving what rightfully theirs?

Especially with the youtube-dl incident.Nat deserves praise for his leadership.

Seems like Nat Friedman is proving to be an excellent CEO for GitHub.

Congrats. This is the kind of news I love to hear especially about &#x27;free flow of information&#x27;.

refugee = outside not inside the country.

<pre><code> &gt; ... country cannot find a proper job. 
</code></pre>
As an Iranian who saw many people back home facing sanctions, those sanctions are enforced based on the country of residence and not origin. So refugees are okay to hire, as are Iranians currently residing in other countries.

&gt; There are a lot of European countries that are willing to hire Syrian refugees without having to make it a humanitarian cause.Not true.Basically you have no idea what is sanctions and how it works.And it is &quot;humanitarian cause&quot; I am not making things up. This is the definition of humanitarian cause.

Syria is destroyed by American politics as much as it is destroyed by Russian and Iranian politics, and primarily Syrian internal politics. There are a lot of European countries that are willing to hire Syrian refugees without having to make it a humanitarian cause.

I hope this is done with Syria which is destroyed by the Iranian regime and left 10 million Syrians as refugees.What makes things worse, Syria is sanctioned which means American companies cannot hire any Syrian because there&#x27;s a legality issue. Meaning even Syrian refugees who fled the country cannot find a proper job.Your country is destroyed, your life is ruined and yet you cannot restore your career. Being denied your right to work is the worst thing that can happen to anyone after war.Yet, I think this is the right decision. Good job GitHub and congrats to our fellow Iranian developers.

This is the kind of activism that I do see valuable form GH. Where there are actual costs and not just catering to a small minority.

Twitter is becoming the outsourced helpdesk of those poor, shoddy transnational corporations. Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc are too poor and incompetent to run a helpdesk that could actually help anybody, but Twitter can. They should raise a fee from those companies for their services.

Send the codes baby. Iran shouldn&#x27;t be deprived of world technological development because the US is an ass.

Wouldn&#x27;t make sense. The blog post indicates they went through legal channels to make this happen

As a Syrian I&#x27;m delighted to see Syria mentioned specifically.I started my career doing iOS development while in Syria and had to jump through hoops and loops so I can submit my apps to the App Store. I had to open accounts in Lebanon, use VPNs to log in to the connect portal and one point even being on the VPN wouldn&#x27;t work.I think more companies need to follow suit here, there are a lot of independent developers in these countries that would benefit from this.

GitLab is looking into whether we may be able to obtain a similar license.PS: I agree this post should be about GitHub and what they achieved for the thriving community of developers in Iran who are making things work despite their circumstances.

Sid, when can we expect the same thing happen at GitLab?PS: I&#x27;m trailing the comments and it is very interesting to see how this post is turned into a competition about GitLab vs. GitHub vs. BitBucket. But fellas, this is not about tech, it&#x27;s about the people who use it. In particular about a thriving community of talented and young developers who have been ignored, sanctioned, and betrayed over and over both domestically and internationally.

&gt;I thank you for thisJust in case you misread. He is the CEO of GitLab.

As an Iranian interested in opensource and free software, I thank you for Gitlab.
It is devastating that this was a thing to begin with. But I&#x27;m happy that at least we can pull&#x2F;push again! 
Happy coding.
Edit: I misread the OP. But the message is still the same, thank you for Gitlab.

After what happened to Ma who would criticize the CCP? He has everything to lose.

We have a really excellent policy regarding government takedowns: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.github.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;free-pro-team@latest&#x2F;github&#x2F;site-policy&#x2F;github-government-takedown-policy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.github.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;free-pro-team@latest&#x2F;github&#x2F;site-...</a>Among other things, the policy requires that governments that want content removed from GitHub issue a lawful request to us, which we then push to a public repo:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;github&#x2F;gov-takedowns" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;github&#x2F;gov-takedowns</a>So you are able to see all of the government takedown requests that we have processed, there. You&#x27;ll notice that there are only 3 directories in that repo: Russia, China, and Spain. When we do (reluctantly) take down content at the request of a government, we try to limit the takedown only to viewers in the country that made the request, rather than doing a global takedown.

Speaking of Nat (and semi-related to this post), I noticed that when he did the reddit AMA just before Microsoft took control the only highly rated question that went unanswered related to censorship in China.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;AMA&#x2F;comments&#x2F;8pc8mf&#x2F;im_nat_friedman_future_ceo_of_github_ama&#x2F;e0a2aob&#x2F;.compact" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;AMA&#x2F;comments&#x2F;8pc8mf&#x2F;im_nat_friedman_f...</a>Now that you guys have had some time to formulate policy do you have any comment?

As the GitLab CEO I want to congratulate Nat and GitHub in obtaining this license. This is great news for the people of Iran, GitHub, open source, and the software industry. Thank you. I imagine obtaining this license took a consistent effort from the company. GitHub and in particular Nat truly care about open source.

Thank you Github. We truly appreciate it. I hope one day US will return to JCPOA, and our government can build on it new deals.

M$: &quot;President of the United States&quot;U$: &quot;CEO of Microsoft&quot;M$: &quot;People are bad-mouthing one of my toys on Hacker News, here is a cheque&quot;U$: &quot;Say no more&quot;

Some sense from the govt agency for a change, it is not as if the IRGC hosts their missile and nuclear programs on Github.

&gt; began a lengthy and intensive process of advocating for broad and open access to GitHub in sanctioned countries.&gt; Over the course of two years, we were able to demonstrate how developer use of GitHub advances human progress, international communication, and the enduring US foreign policy of promoting free speech and the free flow of information.What about orgnanizations and individuals working to hpromote the free flow of information, but aren&#x27;t on the top-5 market cap coporations? Are they also exempt from sanctions?

This is awesome, thank you!It says it&#x27;s a two year effort. It&#x27;s a great length for a company to go for, specially when they could very much default to what other companies are doing and simply block access.As someone who comes from an underprivileged country, and just paid extra to renew a visa just because I come from an underprivileged country, I can see at least part of the daily trouble that we have nothing to do, apart from being born in the &quot;wrong country&quot;.This is a very wholesome news and made my day.

I&#x27;m not impressed with the self-fellatio of how it should be accessible to all.GitHub still denies access to those under 13 to comply with laws.I understand that it has to comply with laws, but it should nevertheless raise the issue and take a stance of disagreement with the law, if it truly believe that all developers should be able to contribute.But that that which is touted as a “universal right” excludes the young, is of course nothing new.

All this will lead to is Iran developing guided missile software written in Rust. These missiles will thus have no known countermeasures.

They donate 2.5x the licensing fee from ICE to &quot;nonprofit organizations working to support immigrant communities targeted by the current administration&quot;.They also mention that &quot;While ICE does manage immigration law enforcement, ... they are also on the front lines of fighting human trafficking [and] child exploitation&quot; and that &quot;GitHub has no visibility into how this software is being used, other than presumably for software development and version control.&quot;If gh were to revoke their licenses, they would probably (a) just switch to gitlab or something similar, (b) be harming the anti-trafficking and anti-child exploitation efforts just as much as their anti immigration, and (c) not have an incentive to donate all this money to support groups.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.blog&#x2F;2019-10-09-github-and-us-government-developers&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.blog&#x2F;2019-10-09-github-and-us-government-deve...</a>

I really, really, would like us to stop considering blocking access to legal organizations because of political views.Can you imagine your license of Microsoft Windows being de-activated because of a social justice campaign?

And yet they make a point to also take ICE&#x27;s money as well.

I gotta say Github seems to me to be using Microsoft&#x27;s deep pockets for good. Not every company could afford to work on this like that.

It seems that they are currently dismantling the restrictions for the already-affected users (since that the licence is specifically only for Iran, not other embargoed countries like Syria). Probably they can submit a request that points out to the post to expedite this.(Now the next challenge is how to get GitHub paid services. As I understand they can now have full services - except that probably no payment processor that handles Iran.)

Seems that some functionalities, such as private repositories, are still not available to the Iranian users: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;yashar_rashedi&#x2F;status&#x2F;1346603803806748676" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;yashar_rashedi&#x2F;status&#x2F;134660380380674867...</a>

And I just wish Iran would stop enriching uranium.

GitHub isn&#x27;t required to work from the US and can choose any other country.

I just wish US stopped acting as if it owns the entire damn planet.

&gt; The people of Iran pay taxes which funds their government.Can they stop? Hardly. As soon as one stops paying taxes and gets caught he is officially a criminal. No he can&#x27;t even emigrate because foreign countries won&#x27;t give him a visa: you usually are required to provide a certificate of having no criminal records at your home country to the embassy when you apply and they don&#x27;t take &quot;I just didn&#x27;t want to support our wicked government&quot; as an excuse.

That&#x27;s a potent verisimilitude. The people of Iran pay taxes which funds their government. The people employed in government positions in Iran, are Iranians. The government of authoritarian regimes and even democratic governments has its hand in all sectors through tariffs, taxes, and regulations.Of course citizens shouldn&#x27;t suffer the pangs of incompetent, lazy, or evil governments. That&#x27;s why virtuous imperialism was a thing.But aside from sounding good, how do you suppose these government sanctions should be instituted in order to be effective?

That&#x27;s an awesome achievement. Sanctions should be imposed on governments, particular corporations and specific individuals. Not on all the people who are only guilty in being unfortunate enough to be born in a particular country or have a reason to visit it.

Honestly, technical reasons should be put forward why a block plainly isn&#x27;t possible. It is also a disadvantage compared to anonymous internet usage in general. I am sure many Iranians used Github just fine.Establish the the network doesn&#x27;t support sanctions like this and diplomatic channels will find other venues. But free net accessibility only helps against regimes like we can find in Iran anyway.

Reading the article, I was honestly surprised that the restrictions were only put in place in 2019 - I distinctly remember some introductory training when joining a US company years ago, which mentioned basically what I understood as: &quot;any business with Iran is forbidden&quot;. Anyone has a clue why it wasn&#x27;t an issue for GitHub earlier?

This is fantastic positive news and I think it will surprise many people (including me) that this was achieved with the involvement of a huge mainstream corporation (Microsoft) under the Trump administration. Congratulations Github.

I wonder what this means for sanctions&#x2F;US GOV action.&quot;Oh, we need to know all the programmers that reside in Iran.&quot;&quot;Let&#x27;s look at github!&quot;Or Maybe it&#x27;s as insidious as hoping some state orgs\Iran based enterprises would use github actively to host and commit code into their infrastructure.It reminds me when I first became aware of how social media companies allow &quot;terrorist&quot; pages up - while there is some chance of recruitment, the intelligence gathered from metadata, who browses, time of engagement and such is much, much more valuable.Super curious, and interesting, how &quot;nice&#x2F;good&quot; gestures can be all part of a game.

GitHub is fully available in Iran