Russian Coders Blocked From Contributing to FOSS Tools

upstart writes:

Russian coders blocked from contributing to FOSS tools:

The Reg has seen two recent incidents of Russian developers being blocked from public development of FOSS code. One was a refusal on the Linux kernel mailing list, the other a more general block on Github. In the last week, these events have both caused active, and sometimes heated, discussions in FOSS developer communities.

The GitHub account of developer Alexander Amelkin has been blocked, and his repositories marked as "archived" - including ipmitool, whose README describes it as "a utility for managing and configuring devices that support the Intelligent Platform Management Interface." Unable to comment on Github itself, Amelkin described what happened on the project's older Soureforge page:

Sorry to say, but on March 1st without any prior notice or any explanation whatsoever, GitHub has suspended my personal account and made orphan all the projects that I owned/maintained.

That includes ipmitool and frugen.

This mailing list and the old sourceforge project page are the only means of communication with you that I have left. I am currently searching for a way to unblock my GitHub or (less preferably) migrate ipmitool once again to another less hostile service.

Amelkin works for Russian chipbuilder Yadro, which we described as working on RISC-V chips back in 2021. Microsoft is just obeying US law in this: according to the War and Sanctions database of the Ukrainian National Agency on Corruption Prevention, the NACP, Yadro is a sanctioned company.

However, on LinkedIn, Amelkin disputes his employer's involvement:

You may rest assured that this "sanctioned corporation" takes no part in this awful war, and even if making civilian server products can be viewed as somehow taking part, that part is definitely far less than what, say, BMW or Bosch took in WW2, yet nobody seems to have cancelled them or at least remembered what they've done, let alone their individual employees. All this is stupid, xenophobic and racist. Especially you labelling me as a terrorist on the basis of my ethnicity.

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