This post is stupid. The whole reason they are blocked is because Russia invaded ukraine, so the US sanctioned them, so Russian developers can’t use Github, not because “microsoft bad” (true but irrelevant in this case) but because Microsoft is legally obligated to block them.
Fuck russia. Honestly this post makes Microsoft, Github and USA look good, and Organic Maps look bad. Organic maps should ban russian developers from contributing.
Honestly after this post I will avoid Organic maps. More like genocide-complicit maps amirite.
Moving off of GitHub is still good, even if you believe their reasoning behind their reasons is incorrect.
Russian bots down voting you.
This is how sanctions work. Don’t like it? Get your government to stop invading Ukraine.
Get your government to stop invading Ukraine.
How about we get the american government to stop supplying Israel with bombs they drop on Gaza? Oh, I guess that’s too much effort.
Not a Russian bot. Down voted it because GitHub is still a poor choice to host open source on nowadays. It’s like someone saying “It’s stupid that such and such switched to renewable energy instead of fossil fuels because they believe the world is flat. The world is not flat!” It’s really missing the forest for the trees.
The US supplied 80% of the bombs dropped on Gaza.
Do you believe US civilians should be prohibited from interacting with the rest of the world?
but_what_about_.jpg
Do you believe US civilians should be prohibited from interacting with the rest of the world?
Yes…? Why haven’t other countries sanctioned the US for Gaza genocide? But that’s also not the point at hand.
but_what_about_.jpg
whataboutism isn’t some magical phrase that you can utter every time someone brings up hypocrisy
if we’re going to support sanctioning civilians based on their countries breaking international law, then we should not have double standards. otherwise it’s very clear to anyone paying attention that this is a geopolitical issue and not a moral one.
and that’s what this is actually about. the US sanctions on Russia are a geopolitical tool meant to make the Russian re-subjugation of Ukraine more expensive. that’s it. US doesn’t actually care about Ukraine- neither this administration or the last.
to me, that doesn’t justify banning individuals from participating in OSS projects. anybody that wants to contribute should be able to.
How the fuck is banning people in certain countries for something they don’t have control over from contributing to small projects like this doing anything but shooting the FOSS ecosystem, which already has a severe shortage of developers, in the foot?
As a US citizen. YES. FFS, the point of sanctions is to compel a change or deter an action. Americans might pay way more attention when the rest of the world puts us in timeout because of the terrible leadership.
Research has shown it has historically had very little to no impact on policy. What it does do is harm the lowest rungs of society.
For example a 2019 report on Trump’s Venezeuala sanctions estimate up to 40,000 people died. Mostly poor people who went without healthcare and medicine because the US froze all of the government’s funds and access to credit.
In my opinion, I’d prefer if we just bombed civilians in the countries we sanction. It’s more honest. It really is a form of low level warfare. Something akin to a medieval raiding party
I mean, it’s probably in their best interest to avoid us. We are a terrible country.
Upvoting for the concise summary of what the article is about (thanks!); not for the opinion expressed (which appears to conflate Russian developers with the actions of the Russian government – something I find problematic at best).
Nothing personal against russian FOSS developers. They should be blocked (sanctioned) from contributing until the sanctions are stopped.
Are you aware of how much open source work comes from Russians? Russians != Russian govt.
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I have nothing against Russian developers. But I do think they should be completely isolated and blocked from the outside world. That’s the whole point of sanctions.
By your logic developers in the US shouldn’t be allowed to contribute to free software either, after all the US is committing genocides and threatening to invade other countries
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I don’t think I want my government deciding who can contribute to my open source project.
When Trump gets into a dick measuring contest with a US ally and sanctions them, POOF foreign contributors are gone. Community management, codebase familiarity, and open PRs be damned. It’ll kill open source projects.
Fuck russia. Honestly this post makes Microsoft, Github and USA look good, and Organic Maps look bad. Organic maps should ban russian developers from contributing.
I… don’t follow. How does this make the Microsoft, Github, and USA look good? The policy here is absolutely stupid.
Me too. I presume half of the votes on this comment are upvotes because they only read the first half of it.
Can you please explain how you come to such a conclusion of your second half, OP? Like you saw, we really don’t follow.
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Anyone have the story behind this? Fuck Microsoft and all that, but Github has historically been pretty good when it comes to not banning people for stupid reasons. Usually, it’s a DMCA thing or a valid security threat.
Recently, there was some controversy about closed source code powering a component of the project (https://github.com/orgs/organicmaps/discussions/9837) but I didn’t keep up with that. Could this ban be related to that?
Some contributer got flagged by US sanctions based on their IP, I think
Welcome to the “free world”.
conservative: says a racial slur
Online Platform: bans user
conservative: “sO mUcH fOr tHe tOlEraNt lEfT 😡”
https://mastodon.social/@organicmaps/114155428924741370
Looks like a contributor was in a sanctioned region?
Looks like a contributor was in a sanctioned region?
Not according to that thread - it looks like they don’t yet know what caused it:
https://mastodon.social/@organicmaps/114178916120483761
No any details from GitHub yet. One contributor mentioned a temporary visit to disputed areas a long time ago — GitHub probably just flagged the account, and their bots messed up after that.
sanctioned region
What’s that?
Insane that Github blocked their entire development without discussing it with them though. Ban the contributor, not the entire open source project.
Sounds like an easy way to do unproportional damage to projects with a bit of location spoofing.
I was very surprised to learn that .NET has an entire team in North Korea
And all of them sharing a single 26k connection, too
I heard they got upgraded to DSL
Nice!
I actually recently set up my own Forgejo instance, and it’s remarkably similar to GitHub, to the point where they share Github’s “actions” code.
Congrats! More hosting diversity is a good thing.
Oh…I was interested until you said actions. What a terrible system for ci.
Yep I got one too. Works great and self hosted. I swear its actually faster than GH is nowadays.
And I like that it doesn’t try to advertise and recommend a ton of repos to do you like GH does now.
The releases page is just as easy to find!
GitHub has slowly become an advertising platform for repos more than anything. I miss what it was just a couple of years ago. It did exactly what you needed when you needed it. Now it’s just so bloated
I love that they have scoped labels while GitHub still doesn’t
Ah, the threatened oligarchy is at it again. I’m sure its purely a coincidence and not at all a retaliation for people abandoning big tech en masse.
So wait.
GitHub is Microsoft?
EDIT: Okay, fuck that. I was just getting all set up there but not now.
I am trying to decide between PyCharm and VS Code for my Python IDE. I was leaning toward VS Code, but they’re Microsoft too, aren’t they?
VS Code has a fully open source base which excludes proprietary extensions and default telemetry ( kind of how AOSP is for Android)
Check here for more info:
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/wiki/Differences-between-the-repository-and-Visual-Studio-Code
And VSCodium is the project that releases builds from the VS Code source code. Privacy-conscious developers should use VSCodium (which is fully FOSS) instead of Visual Studio Code (which is partially proprietary and includes tracking).
Has been since 2018, and acquisition news caused quite an upset at the time.
Yeah they bought them almost 10 years now?
I recommend Codeberg or Forgejo!
PyCharm is a solid choice. It just works. But if you’re open to another editor, take a look at Zed. It has python support too. It’s super snappy and way less bloated than the others.
Who could have ever anticipated Git hub going to shoot after Microsoft bought it
I wish, but when I am looking gor a job the employer will look at the green squares and leetcode score or something stupid like that instead of my projects or having a discussion in general.
There is some serious crapitalist hate for organic maps. I never heard of it util is was taken off the play store for a bit. I side loaded it that day.
Organic Maps is not at feature parity with paid options but it is pretty damn good for FOSS. I use it almost daily for driving around city/suburban Australia and it very rarely gives me bad directions - certainly no more than the paid option i previously used (Sygic).
As long as they are still publishing the apk to f-droid, as a user I hardly care where it’s hosted.
is forgejo the same thing as codeberg? it looks similar… just curious
can someone make a quick intro to what happends for microsoft to block organicmaps account ?
Going by their Mastodon account, seems they were erroneously detected as “from a US-sanctioned region” and it took too long for said error to be resolved, so they just made the switch.
“US sanctioned region” is russia. The developer team fully consist of russian citizens, some of them are still in russia.
Aren’t they now based in Estonia since when the company was established?
They can be de jure in Estonia and de facto wherever they want.
E.g OnlyOffice claim to be based in baltics too, but the development office is still in Nizhniy Novgorod(russia).
De jure is what’s good enough for me. I am not interested in vindicating ordinary Russians for something they couldn’t even vote for.
The developer team fully consist of russian citizens
I dont think thats correct. Do you have a source? The predecessor that it was forked from
maps.memaybe, but the current dev team has nothing to do with that project anymore.
why is Organic Street Maps better than the other ones, that claim to be Open Street Maps derived?
bandwidth is not disposable ya’ll.
Two reasons:
- interface rocks
- maps are downloaded for offline use
I’ve been using OsmAnd for years, and offline maps has always been one of their main things.
OsmAnd is okay, but I really like the interface of Organic Maps better.
Organic Maps is definitely easier to use, especially for new users but OsmAnd is more powerful. I have both and they’re awesome.
I wish there was some way to share the assets since they use the same base data. I use osmand because I find it better for hiking and route planning to send to my watch, but would use organic as well if I I didn’t need to keep two copies of the maps.
Yeah I know what you mean. Map downloads especially can take up a lot of space/take a lot of mobile data to download. I tried to copy them across manually once but it didn’t work.
that’s enough for me, except are the other ones not good?
downloading maps for offline – you nuts? how does anyone profit from the clicks?
They don’t - but at the same time it saves a ton of money on bandwidth
that is an extra plus feature i always wanted from a “smart” phone - offline maps. i spent money on some of those apps back when it was kicking off and a very few of them were actually helpful, like showing me actual USGS topo maps.
would not have helped me that much for survival on my Hawaiian big island fuckabout, because even the big island is not big enough to get truly lost. i tried!
eventually I went downhill on the volcano towards the ocean for a day or two until cell reception and called my girlfriend and told her I hit my head pretty hard and she should come get me.
still the maps would have been super interesting. also, Red River Gorge, and all the southwestern N. America desert.
I tried a lot of them and i like the interface of Organic the best.
What is really needed is a fediverse for git repos
First off, that’s literally what Forgejo is trying to do
Secondly, git is technically already federated.
Things are a lot better than you might think. It’s just that people naturally gravitate towards centralized services, because of the network effect.
