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Comment by smaili | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn't this just add more fuel to the fire for China to crackdown on access to GitHub and ultimately make it even harder for engineers there to use and contribute to projects? Only asking because I recall a time where they did indeed block GitHub because of some of the projects hosted and I'd imagine this might potentially cause a similar course of action.

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I don't think they could afford to block it because China's tech sector is dependent on lots of American-developed open source projects hosted on it. They could set up their own git service and fork them, but they wouldn't get the benefit of ongoing development; they'd be on their own. It's almost like connecting with the rest of the world has tangible benefits...

Yup the PRC's approach so far has been to force the rest of the world of kowtow, company by company, to their ridiculous petulant insecurities and autocratic fascism. That way they get the best of both worlds - a connection to a wide world the paranoid, boot-black politburo need not fear.

Is that not what most countries would do if they had the power to?

I was recently told on HN that Russia is trying to set up something like that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19521584

Or just have a separate instance that automatically forks all pre-approved projects while blocking off the rest, similar to how Google does it.

Honestly I don't see how Github will remain unaffected by the Chinese Government.

that was for shadowsocks I think (e.g. a powerful tool to escape the chinese firewall).

they even tried to DDoS github as far as I remember.

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