Hacker News Reader

Comment by stunt | Hacker News Reader

No, I don't think it's about blocking Github. Many of their tech companies are using open source.

For China it's safer to have a Chinese Github ecosystem. Just imagine if Github suddenly decide to block Chinese users like they did for Iranian users.

It's also strategic for their government and some critical private sector to not put their source code on an American platform. So there are enough incentives especially after everything that happened to Huawei.

View on HN

China already DDoSed GitHub for political reasons in 2015. It doesn't take much imagination to see the aim here. E.g.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/04/ddos-...

They've also blocked github in the past

this is the correct answer. I think this is China's response after seeing Huawei getting blocked from using Google Services.

Github is still owned by an american company and it has shown that it needs to comply with whatever foreign policy that washington enacts. It's reasonable want to have a contingency plan that would allow the Chinese domestic software industry to continue to function when things turn sour between the two powers.

That being said, Github is now owned by Microsoft and Microsoft has a very strong relationship with the Chinese government such that they provided a custom version of Windows 10 for them. https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/21/14998644/microsoft-window... But I see your point.

The USG steamrolls the interests of US companies without a second thought, whenever sanctions are implemented. It doesn't matter how badly Microsoft wants to trade with China, they can't stop sanctions.

I'm pretty sure it's also about being able to ban Github. China banned it once before in 2013 but had to unban it when developers complained that the ban interfered with their work

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_GitHub#China

github = microsoft = it will be changed to work within the china system

Sure. And they also don't let Google (since 2010) to operate in China for the exact same reason.

Yes, because there's no precedent of China blocking services for reasons of censorship and top down control whatsoever.

> Just imagine if Github suddenly decide to block Chinese users like they did for Iranian users

Wait I thought India blocked github, not that github blocked India. Or has there been a whole thing I've missed?

Guessing you misread that? It was "Iran", not "India". ;)

Oh. I'm an idiot

Reply on news.ycombinator.com