GitHub can’t be trusted. Or, how suspending Russian accounts deleted project history and pull requests →
source: jessesquires.comJesse Squires:
According to various reports ([1], [2], [3], [4]), GitHub is suspending accounts of Russian developers and organizations linked to or associated with organizations sanctioned by the US government over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But it appears that GitHub did not think this through entirely, because these account suspensions are fucking up my projects.
First, some brief context and background.
I recently took over as a lead maintainer for two popular projects in the Apple developer community, Quick and Nimble. I just released version 5.0 of Quick a few days ago. During the week leading up to the release, I was reviewing and merging many pull requests. But when it came time to write the release notes, I noticed very bizarre behavior. Mysteriously, some pull requests were deleted. Poof. Gone. Then I realized that an entire contributor’s presence had disappeared — all of their comments on issues were missing, all of the issues they opened were gone, all of the pull requests they opened had vanished. Every piece of activity related to the user was gone. What the fuck?!
In the same colorful language as Jesse…how the fuck did nobody at GitHub realize the negative consequences this would have to the open source community?