{"id":35636,"date":"2022-04-20T14:01:40","date_gmt":"2022-04-20T18:01:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=35636"},"modified":"2022-04-22T22:50:09","modified_gmt":"2022-04-23T02:50:09","slug":"github-deleting-contributions-from-russian-developers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2022\/04\/20\/github-deleting-contributions-from-russian-developers\/","title":{"rendered":"GitHub Deleting Contributions From Russian Developers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jesse Squires<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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According to various reports ([1]<\/a>, [2]<\/a>, [3]<\/a>, [4]<\/a>), 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.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

It is unclear to me what GitHub’s intended result was with these account suspensions, but it appears to be incredibly destructive for any open source project that has interacted with a now-suspended account. On a service like Twitter, you can visit the placeholder profile of a suspended account and see a message communicating that the account is suspended, and other users’ @mentions of the account still link to the suspended account’s profile. On GitHub, that’s not how it works at all.<\/p>\n\n

Apparently, “suspending an account” on GitHub actually means deleting all activity for a user<\/strong> — which results in (1) every pull request from the suspended account being deleted<\/strong>, (2) every issue opened by the suspended account being deleted<\/strong>, (3) every comment or discussion from the suspended account being deleted<\/strong>. In effect, the user’s entire activity and history is evaporated. All of this valuable data is lost.<\/strong> The only thing left intact is the raw Git commit history. It’s as if the user never existed.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n