I'm more curious as to why their existing Microsoft hosting doesn't abide by the sanctions.

This is very sad. We are using GitLab.com because the terms of use says:

21. Governing law [1]

This Agreement shall be governed by and interpreted in accordance with the laws of the Netherlands.

Is there a code hosting service in Europe or any place of the world that cubans can use?

1. https://about.gitlab.com/terms/#gitlab_com

I believe that GCP is accessible from all of those places. They simply don't guarantee it will remain available, or have any kind of SLA.

Do we know if there are people using gitlab.com in North Korea?

Sometimes open source projects tend to link to their git repos.

Hypothetically something to bypass censorship might just point you to a README on a repo for installation details.

Right, I get that it can be useful, I was just interested if there was any indications of gitlab being used in NK. Considering Red Star OS (the NK linux distro) it wouldn't be unimaginable if there was a gitlab fork or a few gitlab.com repos used by NK.

Why Crimea though? If Russia annexed it, why not block entire Russia?

Such a ban is pointless unless you block every business which does business with Russia and that is not possible. Eastern European countries, ex soviet satellites, etc would have to pick sides and that kind of final decision isn't in our best interests or theirs.

If you only block doing business with Russia, then middlemen in other countries will just have to be go-betweens making a politically inflammatory action (blocking a world power) that wasn't actually effective beyond being offensive.

Blocking Crimea is a symbolic but also mostly ineffective practice done to make a statement. Making that statement about the entire country wouldn't be prudent.

Restricting US companies from doing any business with Russia hurts the US economy too much.

Based on my napkin math using 2017 data, Russia makes up 0.45% of US exports, and 0.43% of imports. So I think there must be more to it than:

> Restricting US companies from doing any business with Russia hurts the US economy too much.

sources:

https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c4621.html

https://www.statista.com/statistics/218255/total-value-of-us...

No it doesn’t. Non-energy related trade is basically nil.

Sanctions on specific areas of conflict are not unique or new and they are not limited to online services you can’t sell anything to Crimea doesn’t matter if it’s physical or not.

I would assume anyone who uses Gitlab in one of these countries has already been using proxies for a long time, and that this is not going to pose the slightest problem?

Could they refer customers to proxy service(s) on neutral soil ?

If not, can/should someone post here?

If they could access Gitlab when on Azure, this is a very shitty regression.

Kinda sad that GitLab doesn't point to VPN providers that those users could use to route around this legal issue.

That opens a can of worms from a legal perspective, and they are a US business..

EDIT: It's one thing to accidentally be violating an embargo, it's another thing entirely to suggest ways to bypass it on your company site.

GitLab doing so would be arguably a deliberate violation of sanctions. While GitLab is not responsible if users decieve them about origin by using a VPN, they absolutely are if they choose an compliance mechanism that can be tricked by a VPN and then point people from sanctioned countries to a VPN provider that will trick their compliance mechanism.

The law can be stupid, but it's rarely as stupid as the people suggesting simple hacks around it think it is.