GitHub blocks entire company because one employee was in Iran

The list employs some particular filters (e.g. SaaS seems to be excluded) and heavily emphasizes market cap over revenue.

The first one is a violent crime against individuals, the second one is basically a tax.

I'm against both but they carry a different weight.

If GitHub is offline we can still setup a git server somewhere. I could offer my own for a quick startup. Mailing patches to each other, Linux kernel style, is not a viable backup plan. The cultural gap is too wide.

If Travis is down we can run tests locally.

We build the deployment artifact on one of our servers. If that one is down probably our production server is down too.

If Slack is down, ah, I was on vacation yesterday. I guess the fastest backup for us would be WhatsApp Web.

I use a ISP in the Netherlands that was founded only recently, I and frequently encounter sites that think I'm in Dubai, which is apparently where the previous owner of my IP block was located.

Fortunately, the only problems this seems to cause for the moment are that I occasionally get geo-blocked by some sites' overly-aggressive firewall rules, and I get Twitter ads in Arabic.

But I shudder to think what might happen should the UAE find itself under sanction.

If they do that within the US market, that might be justifiable. But in this particular case, GitHub appears to enforce US foreign policy on what appears to be a company on the EU market. Also in what to me appears to be a rather ruthless, totalitarian, maybe even draconian way.

I'm pretty certain that absent this US law within the EU market, this action is arbitrarily discriminatory, and very likely constitutes inflicting serious damage on another company without a legal basis (within the US, yes .. outside the US, no).

GitHub may find itself stuck, between adhering to US laws and laws elsewhere (in this case EU, but China is probably a good example too). Still, is ultimately is a choice for GitHub to offer their products on multiple markets. If they have issues with that, they are free to exit a particular market. It certainly is never a valid excuse to start violating law in any market outside whatever country your headquarter might be located.

Tangentially, this rather typical popular belief that US companies can simply absolve themselves from legal liability, just by crafting clever TOS/EULA that supposedly does just that, has always confused to me. It was always my understanding that you can not create contracts that violate laws. In most countries with a somewhat sane state of law, governments really do not like or tolerate when companies start essentially making their own law in parallel. But apparently you can rewrite (even basic) law in the USA, as long as you can somehow get both parties to agree on it. Be that by free will or coercion.

Maybe it's time, for other parts of the world to no longer put up with this kind of bullshit, and demand that US companies actually adhere to the laws (and legal protections) that exist within their markets, or be free to buzz off and only operate on the US market alone.

With US foreign policy becoming increasingly self-serving, legally dubious, and in some case downright insane, having internationally operating companies enforcing those policies is becoming a seriously risky proposition for anyone outside the USA.