What happened? Why did github block them?
this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2025
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OrganicMaps GitHub repo was blocked due to contributor being geolocated in a US-sanctioned place https://mastodon.social/@organicmaps/114155428924741370
🎉 sometimes US sanctions actually do lead to positive outcomes :)
the world adapts :)
Wow, I read that in the completely wrong way for a sec and wondered, why you had 38 upvotes for promoting the banning of open source contributions from certain countries.
Btw. how do we get them to do that banning for the whole of EU? Asking for a friend.
Thank you. Would you mind explaining what this means please? What is a U.S.-sanctioned place? Why does the U.S. government think this is a bad thing?
contributor being geolocated in a US-sanctioned place
US likes to impose arbitrary sanctions on its adversaries. Basically the US government decided that people from a particular country aren't allowed to collaborate with people using US based platforms like GitHub.
What is a U.S.-sanctioned place? Why does the U.S. government think this is a bad thing?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_government_sanctions
The US has been punishing open source contributors from countries they don't like.
Which sanctioned country? There are several of them.
Guess Russia.
Yeah, that was my first guess, but I don't like to assume.
I wasn't curious enough to look deeper.
🙄
Was just about to post this before @[email protected] beat me to the punch. 🙂👍
Why are so many projects still on Microsoft-owned github? They should follow OM's lead.
Visibility :/
No one goes for source unless they have recommendation or use it and it wouldn't matter in those cases where it is hosted.
Lot's use Github, but it doesn't matter. Lots hate Microsoft too.
Oh, outside Western sphere (including my coountry), there are a lot of tech entusiast that also a Microsoft "fans, "the same way Apple fans are exist.
Also, in my experience, despite I hate Microsoft, I found so many niche open source project that almost never in any English FOSS discussion. Especially, project that belongs to Indonesian, Chinese, or Japanese FOSS community. Example: video player with Japanese learning capabilities, video downloader for specific Chinese video hosting, or anime tracker with Chinese site as its database.
I wish FOSS community will provide alternative to social experience and recommendation like GitHub. With ActivityPub :)
Github is basically social media but for tech nerds. Social media networks naturally monopolize, as they primarily have value because everyone else is already there. If you put your project on Github and it is popular you might get 2k "stars" and regular pull requests. If you put your project on an alternative you might get 10X less of both. So people make decisions about the trade-offs between exposure and avoiding Microsoft
I think we all know this, but it's the exact same argument for Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn. Getting off centralized, corporate, for-profit cloud services should be a priority for anyone who is philosophically aligned with FOSS.
Organic Maps said not to blame this on Microsoft but rather on US law
I'll just go ahead and take the liberty of blaming both.
I think every other Us based company has to follow the same laws, as you'd expect tbh.
Anything that follows the fascist US regime's laws should be boycotted. Congrats to OrganicMaps for ditching Github.
I’m out of the loop. Why did github “block” Organic Maps?
One of the contributors was in a country that the USA likes to bully with sanctions.
There is a comment on this post with a link to Mastodon for Organic Maps
Thanks for posting this. I was able to get my obtanium source changed. Really annoying though. Fuck Microsoft!
Only issue is no federation support on forgejo. I know they are working and wish goodluck to them!! So excited
looks that way
Today you need to be independent. I hope other projects will follow suit.
P.S. GitHub has announced a limit of 100,000 repositories per user or organization account. The limit will take effect on April 28.
Nice, looks like they are self hosting then?
Downloading the app just because of this
Good stuff.