As for making this public we are public by default. But we are learning that anything involving countries needs to be communicated with a lot of context. Countries are a core part of people their identity.
In the future any decision involving countries will still be public but the discussion will not be.
The two are so correlated that they might as well be the same, and it strikes me as dishonest to make the distinction.
Gitlab is remote-only though so I doubt they see many job-related moves.
It's like saying "we don't hire people in Alabama" and "we don't hire black people".
Are those two statements equivalent?
There very well may be real reasons not to hire people in Alabama, (I'm making these up).. Onerous regulations, taxes too high, etc. Not hiring a class of people because of what they are is very different.
The whole problem at Gitlab is that nobody could articulate a concrete reason to ban people who live in Russia whereas in China they wouldn't hire them because of the Great Firewall and the block of google whose services were important to job functions.
That isn't entirely true anymore since there is a strong fear of retaliation, so many have chosen to stay quiet.
Meanwhile more half baked features like "Auto Devops" and "Cycle Analytics" are piled on. The docker/runner based CI is barely functional and any serious project runs up against the limitations of it (and the abysmal syntax of .gitlab-ci.yml) regularly.
-- Sir Arnold, Yes, Minister
Would I want an unwavering commitment to do everything in the open from my employer?
Clearly people who joined GitLab knew that was the deal and, while I see the point you're making, VC-funded code hosting (plus extras) isn't in the same league as the government.
reality is that we have public discussions about issues that cause a lot of damage to those actually involved.
public discourse prevents people from fixing mistakes and clearing up misunderstandings. once a statement is public, it is effectively no longer possible to apologize for it because there will always be some people who reject the apology and discredit it, when they even have no involvement in the actual issue.
this is the problem we have with mass media that doesn't do much solve problems but has a strong influence in driving the negotiating parties apart.
there are issues that need to be discussed on a global level, but most of what we are actually discussing does not need to be public.
If GitLab's actions really were as you describe, they'd be in real trouble.
Russia and China engage in state sponsored industrial espionage, hacking and sometimes destructive measures frequently. Of course others have as well, but not nearly to anything resembling the same level and scale.
It got so bad at work, we had to block the entire country subnets at our routers. I would also think that most corporations would probably not allow for this. While the recent South Park episodes show a lot of humor, they don't even scratch the surface of how bad things are and how much internal influence and coercion those countries have on their residents.
Some of the best programmers I've worked with in my career are expats from China and Russia, including running a dev team out of China a while back, but I absolutely would not want to do significant (software/development/it) infrastructure business with residents of those countries in practice. It's unfortunate in the software development space in particular.
Limiting access by regional location is something all countries and companies do, especially for sensitive data with complex security policies.