Reality dictates that politics are inherent in human society. You are not above it, and neither is your hobby. Ignoring society is a privilege that never lasts.

Yeah I understand the reality of the situation, I probably shouldn't have said "I don't understand" in my comment. I just think it's a shame. I don't contribute to OSS, but I also think it's more than a "hobby". I'd rather see it as an international movement. I hope that one day the UN or something similar provides an equivalent service to Github without commercial interests. Even the UN is heavily politicised, but I don't like that the US alone gets to dictate what happens to some of the most important repositories of shared human technological knowledge when those repositories have been heavily contributed to by citizens of countries other than the US.

Very few people have listened when the minority raised alarms about so much "open source" development concentrated into one privately-owned closed-source service. You, and many others, have said you don't like the US government controlling this information, but people rarely seem to be interested in doing anything about it.

Nothing is stopping this person from sending email patches like they do in the Linux kernel project. No sanctions are involved in this person hosting a Git installation in Crimea that the rest of the world can access.

The problem isn't politics. The problem is that programmer culture currently conflates "access to Github" (which is a service run at the whims of an American defense contractor) with "free or open-source software" (which is a spectrum of opinions about copyright law). They are not related concepts, no matter what Github's marketing team has convinced the world.

"Open source" started in part as a political shift from the older free software movement. One justification was that companies were avoiding free software because they considered its ideological basis as incompatible with profit. Instead, "open source" focused on the development benefits, eg, others may find bugs and contribute code.

I therefore agree with the view that 'free software' is a social movement, while 'open source' is a development methodology.

OSS is full of commercial interests well beyond hobby interests. Joel Spolsky pointed that out in https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ :

> I noticed something interesting about open source software, which is this: most of the companies spending big money to develop open source software are doing it because it’s a good business strategy for them, not because they suddenly stopped believing in capitalism and fell in love with freedom-as-in-speech.

The free software movement is itself political - as are all social movements. For example, the emphasis on end-user freedoms related to copyright protection conflict with the emphasis on worker rights embodied in the Anti 996 License.

Whether it is open source or not, GitHub is an American corporation (owned by Microsoft) and what it does is commercial activity.

This isn't a free speech issue. It's not even a corporate free speech issue. This is commercial activity.

Whether this is good policy or not, is another matter but it isn't a free speech matter.

The Olympics and other athletic organizations support commercial activity, with many athletes coming to compete from sanctioned countries, where corporations benefit from the activity.

Seeing free/open source software in the same light ideologically is not that much of a leap. There is precedent.

How did the free software movement allow a private commercial business to obtain so much power over it?

Private commercial businesses do this, they fool you with their marketing and make you think that their product is also free and open source. Github's branding and marketing are to thank. And the blame also goes to us and other developers for not seeing this.

Yes, the similar stories happen again and again. As a good reflection, there was that comics with the "world tiniest open source violin" https://xkcd.com/743/

Freely. Or cheaply. Or maybe just conveniently. Linus is worth an estimated $150M and he has a lot of power over it. It’s a conundrum.

You can thank O'Reilly and friends who undermined it by creating the Open Source movement.

"OSS being politicised"

GitHub is a subsidiary of Microsoft, a US company with lucrative interests in the US government. While this does indeed stifle OSS activity for people in Crimea it isn't really about OSS.

Oh I probably misworded my comment, I understand the legal and geopolitical reality, it just pains me that it's turned out this way.

Because US corporations and non-US corporations with major US operations tend not to want to risk it and comply with sanctions.

These sanctions tend not to be universal and some services can continue to be provided, however the price of violating said sanctions can be very severe.

I don’t know how many people who work at Github or PayPal especially senior management are willing to risk fines not to mention jail time for something as simple as some Russian officer buying a DVD on the internet while being stationed in Crimea or a local IT guy from the current pro-Russian government making a pull request.

This sort of argument is usually applied to sports.

> I reject the idea of OSS being politicised.

Then don't use github. I don't. It's completely toxic.