GitHub mistakenly restricted access to the Aurelia repository due to trade sanctions

Rob Eisenberg, web framework creator Aurelia, сообщил about blocking by GitHub repositories, site, and access to the Aurelia project admin settings. Rob received an email from GitHub stating that the block was due to US trade sanctions. It is noteworthy that Rob lives in the USA and works as an engineer at Microsoft, which owns GitHub, so it was even difficult for him to imagine that sanctions could be attached to his project (the project 26 developers from USA, Europe, Australia, Russia, Japan, Thailand and Bangladesh).

GitHub support did not explain the details of the lock and recommended write appeal. After submitting an appeal within an hour of GitHub removed the lock. It is noteworthy that this is not the first case of incomprehensible blocking this month - on March 9, without explanation, the blocking was applied to projects catamphetamine (libraries with various JavaScript components developed by an author from Moscow), but was removed a week later, after discussion on Hacker News (the reason for blocking was a complaint about a humorous comment by the author with obscene language addressed to another user, which was perceived as an insult).

Nat Friedman, GitHub lead, publicly apologized to the community and explained that blocking the Aurelia project was a terrible mistake and an investigation was launched on GitHub as to how such a misunderstanding could happen. Based on the results of the investigation, everything possible will be done to prevent the occurrence of similar incidents in the future.

The possibility itself like blocking explained by the fact that any company that does business in the United States is required to comply with the laws of this country, including regulations regarding trade sanctions. It does not matter which country the company is in, trade restrictions must be met even if the company simply has customers in the US or interacts with the US banking infrastructure.

Export laws prohibit the provision of commercial services or services that may be used for commercial purposes to residents of sanctioned countries. In doing so, GitHub applies as far as possible the soft legal interpretation of the law (export restrictions do not apply to publicly available open source software), for example, does not limit access of users from sanctioned countries to public repositories and does not prohibit personal communications.

Source: opennet.ru