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A comment on JetBrains Research. Parent comment

Re:JetBrains Research by euos on Wednesday August 17, 2022 @03:17PM (#32500520)
They are a Russian company with most engineers in Russia. There had been a strong records in Russian social networks of their engineers supporting Russian attacks on other countries (e.g. there was one engineer back in 2014 who moderated another forum and was banning Ukrainians and expressing glee at annexation of Crimea).

They had been working hard to distance themselves from Russia. You may also notice similar spike in activity from Yandex, who had been publishing open-source project at elevated rate last half a year.

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Re:JetBrains Research by atemerev on Wednesday August 17, 2022 @03:27PM (#32500645)
They are a Czech company with founders originally from Russia (but most of them moved to other countries long time ago). Their leadership do not support war in Ukraine and doing many things to help Ukrainians. As for the opinions of individual engineers — there are many engineers in, say, FAANG, and other companies who sadly expressed pro-Russian views in social media. I have seen them here on Hacker News.
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Re:JetBrains Research by euos on Wednesday August 17, 2022 @04:05PM (#32501068)
Yandex "parent company" is in Netherlands. Kasperky Lab "is operated" by a UK holding company.

They are one of the "sneaky" Russian companies who make money on the West but fully support Russian government. Czech office and such is to keep appearances.

1. Business/sales in Czech, eng in Saint-Petersburg. At least, used to.

2. They did not react on Ukrainians discussing their employee pro-war stance. They made sure to clean up all discussions on their forums and elsewhere.

3. They formally closed the offices. Employee are working remotely from Russia.

There already was a SolarWinds breach. There will be more.

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Re:JetBrains Research by atemerev on Wednesday August 17, 2022 @04:23PM (#32501248)
Solarwinds/Jetbrains association was a journalist mistake:

https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2021/01/06/statement-on-the-...

https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2021/01/07/an-update-on-sola...

https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2021/01/08/january-8th-updat...

"we have proactively reached out and spoken to the US Department of Justice, and have offered them our full cooperation in this matter."

Jetbrains are not Kaspersky, they are one of the good guys, as far as my numerous sources confirm.

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Re:JetBrains Research by euos on Wednesday August 17, 2022 @04:27PM (#32501295)
Right. The fabled "good Russians". That do not support the "Putin war". They probably even put "support Ukraine in any means possible" on their LinkedIn profiles.
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Re:JetBrains Research by atemerev on Wednesday August 17, 2022 @04:40PM (#32501416)
Absolutely. Also sending money and helping with logistics. If you have taken a look at the said LinkedIn profile, you might have noticed a post which says that "not supporting the Putin's war" is no longer enough. We need to do something to help Ukraine win.

I am not saying this gives an indulgence or something — I am not the one being bombed. Everything I do will probably not be enough. But it is not an excuse to do nothing.

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Re:JetBrains Research by euos on Wednesday August 17, 2022 @04:57PM (#32501625)
I will not resume this discussion here. You will probably see me on your LinkedIn. Feel free to reach out if you wonder where me, my family and my friends would like you to put your money.
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Re:JetBrains Research by maxdo on Wednesday August 17, 2022 @03:37PM (#32500753)
They are as Czech as google or apple a company from Ireland. they've been part of security incidents involved traces with Russia. Their presence in Russia is huge. Working with them is a potential risk.
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Re:JetBrains Research by mike_hearn on Wednesday August 17, 2022 @04:35PM (#32501370)
"they've been part of security incidents involved traces with Russia"

You mean that some company that ran a poorly secured TeamCity instance and got hacked decided to try and shift the blame to JetBrains, knowing full well that a certain demographic will eat up anything vaguely of the form "Six Degrees of Kevin Russian"?

Yeah no. Most sensible people don't consider a connection as tenuous as "some company that got hacked had misconfigured a product made by a company with offices in country X" as a reasonable thing to make insinuations on.

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Re:JetBrains Research by atemerev on Wednesday August 17, 2022 @03:48PM (#32500868)
They are closing Russia’s offices right now and offering relocation packages to everyone still left there.

It is somewhat hard to work with Russian security services after this statement: https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2022/03/11/jetbrains-stateme...

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Re:JetBrains Research by comonoid on Wednesday August 17, 2022 @03:52PM (#32500920)
My sources state that they have closed all Russia's offices and terminated contracts with everyone who haven't relocated.

Update: technically, there are some corporate lawyers and accountants that are working on closing JetBrain's LLC in Russia. But we are talking about software engineers, aren't we?

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Re:JetBrains Research by euos on Wednesday August 17, 2022 @04:07PM (#32501100)
And my sources show otherwise... Offices are closed, I give you that.
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Re:JetBrains Research by euos on Wednesday August 17, 2022 @04:10PM (#32501115)
You'll be surprised how understanding Russian security services are to business climate. Russians are survivalists.

Pretty sure GRU officer was typing that blog entry with one hand, keeping fingers on other hand crossed behind his back.

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