Please note that pnpm is currently blocking all traffic from Russia and Belarus https://twitter.com/pnpmjs/status/1498306992577957890
There's what, maybe a handful of people who can make that happen?
Fortunately for me as a developer in the USA, I guess most of them, in the Global south, aren't developers, or know they can't be successful as developers blocking traffic from the USA, no matter how many atrocities the US military or intelligence have committed in their countries. :(. I guess if they wanted to try, it's an interesting question if that would be some kind of effective action in changing US atrocious behavior. Probably not. :(
That said, this is basically a form of boycott. There does seem to have been some significant change of opinion around the value and ethics of the tool, from when the main example we had was the BDS movement called by Palestinian civil society against Israel. (Which by the way, does not in fact call for doing things like blocking all network access to those in Israel, what people are doing against Russia is way broader and less targetted than what the... more controversial(?) Palestinian-led BDS has done or called for against Israel. Which is interesting.)
In Russia there are some good people but they are in extreme minority. Extreme. Even the liberals in Russia are supporting the annexation of Crimea. Maybe the dictatorship is the reason, maybe the propaganda. I don't know and I don't care. This is how it is and I do what I can to exclude them from my life.
Actually america has been by far the biggest aggressor on the planrt in tge last decades, and it killed the most civilians outside Africa.
That's my problem with this massive anti russian hysteria in software.
You only appear careless, racist and naive. It's better to avoid politics in software and business, because if you don't you have to basically ban anyone.
Please don't use pnpm. Use Yarn or npm, those are better package managers for you.
OS and politics should not be mixed. Your actions do nothing but say that you will "weaponize" an open source library to match one goal "punishing Russians" but not punishing other perpetrators.
If every software maintainer started to apply its own political views and ban some users the entire ecosystem would implode.
Should muslim developers ban all chinese users for the uighur concentration camps, and myanmaris for their treatment of Rohingya?
Should I, a Polish developer, ban Ukrainians because they hail as a hero and title streets to a criminal like Bandera that killed my own polish family in eastern galicia during world war two?
Where and when would this hysteria end?
I have sympathy for your situation, but not for such solutions. They damage everyone, including OSS.
- Supporting an annexation that has already happened is not the same as supporting a war.
- That being said, even the liberals in the US supported the various invasions and occupations. Don't forget that Libya happened under Obama.
- Even the liberals in Turkey are supporting the annexation of northern Cyprus, even the liberals in China support the annexation of Tibet, etc. It is not something unique to Russia.
"In Russia there are some good people but they are in extreme minority"
Bush's approval rating was the highest when he declared the invasion of Afghanistan (90%) and when he declared the invasion of Iraq (70%).
In addition to that this is typical racist rhetoric, I have heard exactly the same thing about Mexicans, Blacks, Albanians, Jews, Roma, etc.
Anyway, this does not explain your plan to keep the restriction permanently. After all they will not be paying taxes that fund the war effort after the war is be over.
The US has and continues to do some pretty awful things around the world. Turning some parts of Pakistan into hellscapes where an invisible drone could kill you from the sky at any time and regularly does kill women and children with no warning, would be one example.
The vast majority of citizens in the US either pay no attention to this at all, or think it's a a good thing. There is a minority who think it's awful. (I suspect these proportions are pretty similar in Russia).
Since the US is theoretically a democracy, we citizens could, one would think, easily stop these things by voting for different people, you'd think people would hold us more accountable and be really mad at us. But somehow they don't, they're like, eh, most people in the US are good people I don't blame them for their government!
And to be fair, I wish I knew how to get my government to do something different -- or how to get more people in the country to pay attention to the really catastrophically criminal things my goverment does, I don't feel like I have much control over it either. (Although surely more than Russians do, in the really not a democracy of Russia?) I do what I can, I am politically involved where I can find the energy to be. It doesn't feel like enough. I'm not sure I or my country-mates deserve the dispensation to not be held responsible.
I think most governments do awful -- really horrendous, murderous -- things. I think tmost people are fundamentally good people, but many citizens of powerful countries doing bad things have these days been hoodwinked to ignore them or support them.
I wish I knew what to do about it. One thing I am personally sure of is that it starts from not judging people by their ethnicity or nationality -- that kind of thinking is what helps governments convince their residents that the violent things they are doing to someone else are ok. That's the problem not the solution.
But I'm not opposed to boycotting as a tactic. I do support BDS against Israel. The BDS organizers have been very careful (and learning from experience) at trying to figure out how to do it in a way that is ethical and maximizes effectiveness. (I think the BDS campaign has been effective, relative to anything else done to try to support Palestinians, although not nearly as effective as one would like, which goes without saying as Israel continues it's decades-long occupation). But reading what they have to say on the topic of boycotts against invaders, Israel, and Russia, is in my opinion worthwhile: https://bdsmovement.net/Hypocrisy
Russians that leave Russia are not blocked.
I am Hungarian by ethnicity. I will be probably also judged for the terrible policy of Orban. I feel deep shame for it. So I understand (a little) in what situation those "good" Russians are. And I know that those Russians support my decision and understand it.
Are you gonna ban Israeli for their apartheid, chinese for the uighurs concentration camps, myanmari for ethnic cleansings of Rohingya? What about americans and the 200k civilians killed in iraq in an illegal and unprovoked aggression?
See what's the point of doing lame politics like that? You end up declaring to the world that 800 villages burned and 50k civilians thrown in fire matter none to you because they aren't white.
I feel disgust at these double standards, at showing to the world that there are tier 1 and tier 2 victims.
Or do you just care a
I fundamentally disagree with the blockade. this moves makes this project incompatible with open source licensing.
if anyone is interested in this sub thread, it diverge from the discussion around the tool itself, but note that all the project standing for Ukraine in this manner are: - breaking one of the fundamental principle of open source - pretty risky to use. what if your locality also becomes block-listed. - demonstrates a poor judgment from their authors, who more often than not are reluctant to debate/reconsider their position.
Reactions to extreme circumstances can understandably be emotional, it doesn't imply that logical criticisms are necessarily insensitive.
Ironically, blocking Russian IP addresses could be seen as a form of non-violent protest against Russian web censorship.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_Ru...