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Comment by phplovesong | Hacker News Reader

IIRC jetbrains was a russian company, backed by people close to putin. Then they "migrated" away from russia (jetbrains users are 90% westerners) to avoid losing their users, and even made some blog post about it, but from what i have heard the people behind the curtains whose names are in no legal papers are in fact still the same people with close ties to putin and his inner circle.

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Where have you heard about these people whose names are in no legal papers? Is the source credible? Is there any proof?

Putin has nothing to do with it, pretty sure he doesn’t even know who they are. JetBrains founders are Russians, but they registered the company in Prague as their goal was foreign markets from the beginning and it was much safer to do business there than in 90’s Russia. Most of their programmers and RnD were Russians, they had close ties with several top Russian Universities to hire students from there. But yes, in 2022 they were told by their Western customers that they have to leave if they want their products to be bought, and JB evacuated from Russia, relocated people and fired those, who refused to leave, blocked Russian customers and in some cases terminated their ongoing licenses, forced their employees to cut any cooperation with Russia (their head of Kotlin decided to quit the company due to this policy and returned to Russia). And since then the quality of JB products has dropped noticeably, they had to cancel some of their products, looks like they still struggle to replace those people they’ve lost and Western companies still refusing to work with them due to a mass amount of ethnic Russians still in place.

> But yes, in 2022 they were told by their Western customers that they have to leave if they want their products to be bought, and JB evacuated from Russia, relocated people and fired those, who refused to leave, blocked Russian customers and in some cases terminated their ongoing licenses, forced their employees to cut any cooperation with Russia (their head of Kotlin decided to quit the company due to this policy and returned to Russia).

And they're still considered Russian company, how hilarious.

They were choosing between being humiliated and losing customers, now they're both humiliated and losing customers.

Nobody likes traitors. My guess is that in a couple of years JetBrains gonna be bought by one of the USA corps, most probably Google.

Why traitors? That's a very harsh word.

'from what I have heard'? From where?

It's in the original post:

>The official reason given was that Jetbrains has Russian ties. No amount of arguing could get leadership to reverse the decision.

The original post says nothing about "the people behind the curtains whose names are in no legal papers are in fact still the same people with close ties to putin and his inner circle.", which is the sentence that comes directly after phplovesong says "from what I've heard"

All 135 mln ethnic Russians seem to have close ties to Putin, from what I understand reading Western media.

And IIRC they just had some controversy of having a "default enabled" LLM harvesting or something like that no?

> IIRC jetbrains was a russian company, backed by people close to putin

Who are these people?

As far as I remember, JetBrains was founded in 2000 by a couple of Russian immigrants in Prague back when no one knew who Putin was. They had an office in St.Petersburg which was closed in 2022, they don't sell in Russia anymore, and ban all Russian users. What's the evidence of them having ties to Putin?

Let's suppose that's true, so what? Is Putin Satan now? I don't see anyone rushing to boycott US companies over its state policy...

Intellij is a great product, I would still use it even if it were Israeli.

It's perfectly valid to boycott a company if you disagree with their ideology.

For example, when chick-fil-a was openly anti-gay marriage (including after Obergefell), I stopped eating there. As a gay man, I don't want my money going to people who actively wish to harm me.

And it's fine. It was low friction, and I've saved a lot of calories.

That doesn't mean you're then required to boycott everything. Perfect isn't the enemy of good. If you feel like it, boycott.

It's a valid position to have. Same way as our customers are important targets for Russian state intel. actors so to minimize risk we will not be using product X is also perfectly valid position to have.

Satan can be reasoned with.

"Is Putin Satan now?"

Yes.

This is especially funny to read from someone who calls himself gorbachev here.

Well by USSR standards Gorbachev was a softy

Exactly. The context here requires us to remember that US, and UK, etc governments are funding and providing weapons to a genocide being carried out by Israel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides

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