this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2025
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Most open source projects are important alternatives to escape pilitical and commercial control/limitations/censorship existant in commercial products, driven by commercial interests. With the current situation all US-based companies are even more subject to political pressure.

An embargo by the US towards any country/entity would mean US companies have to shut down their services for that entity.

As many open source projects seem to be hosted on github (M$), could they be blocked nearly instantly? Thus giving the pumpkin the power to sabotage alternatives to US controlled tools?

(Hope I‘m not in the wrong community to bring this up. Hints to better suited places are welcome.)

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[–] onlinepersona@programming.dev 15 points 6 days ago

I brought this up a month ago regarding the lemmy repo. At least they have mirrors and won't be fucked if the orange terminator decides opensource is a danger to US companies or whatever. But there are many projects that would be absolutely fucked. An infinitesimal minority probably backs up their github issues and PRs.

Projects like nixos and probably the entire rust ecosystem would break. They are all in on Github.

The US defunded TOR, Tails, and F-Droid. There also was a time when cryptography was embargoed by the US.

So yes, IMO the US is a risk for opensource and the majority of the opensource community has sleep-walked into a gilded cage. Rattling the bars hasn't helped and it is only when the door closes that they'll wake up. Luckily, this isn't like climate change where there's no way back within multiple generations, but nonetheless, the awakening will be rude.

Anti Commercial-AI license

[–] mbirth@lemmy.ml 12 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Not just a risk, it already happened that the OrganicMaps GitHub repo got locked b/c one contributor appeared to have travelled through a sanctioned region.

https://mastodon.social/@organicmaps/114155428924741370

https://mastodon.social/@organicmaps/114178916120483761

[–] mesamunefire@piefed.social 2 points 6 days ago

And emulators within GitHub. Thankfully the development continues.

[–] teri@discuss.tchncs.de 8 points 6 days ago

In m opinion this is a real risk. In case od Organic maps already started happening. The FOSS community should move away from github and consider alternatives like codeberg.org (germany) or self-hosted forgejo instances to mitigate the risk.