Why blocked?
> We have a temporary glitch with GitHub—probably some contributor was geolocated in a sanctioned region (no details yet). All required documents to unlock the account have been uploaded. Don't blame Microsoft/GitHub - it is just U.S. law. Please be patient. It should be unblocked soon.
I don't think this is a question of blame, rather than suitability. In the spirit of blameless postmortem, I'll state that GitHub was found unsuitable for hosting a FOSS project.
Why it's unsuitable is truly a secondary question, but it shouldn't prevent us, Free Software maintainers, from drawing necessary conclusions.
It's a tired argument, but what if we replace "US" in your sentence with "Chinese", "Russian" or "Iranian"?
Considering how the government of "the shining beacon of democracy" is currently running more like one of the above countries, I think it's a good comparison. But I'm guessing plenty here MAGA disagree.
Codeberg is a non-profit association registered in Berlin, Germany. The abbreviation e.V. stands for eingetragener Verein, which translates as ‘registered association’.
As defined by its Bylaws, its goal is to “guarantee the openness and continued availability of free software”.
Forgejo has to abide by Codeberg’s goals. We believe that this arrangement reinforces the longevity of Forgejo, as far as the project’s stability and financial security is concerned.
Codeberg e.V. owns Forgejo’s domains, provides resources and cooperates closely with Forgejo.
And while this is using ForgeJo - the software Codeberg develops - it is hosted by OrganicMaps themselves. Thereby, it is very unlikely that somebody else takes this down for whatever reason.
I think it's not bad to remember people from time to time that "just following orders" oder "Just doing my job" isn't an universal excuse and that we hanged people rightfully for "just" doing that. If that's your only excuse for what you're doing you may should at least deeply think again if what you're doing is excusable.
They only want to protect MS in this case, I guess to increase their chance to resolve it positively.
But I just recently thought about this. If you develop exploits for say NSO und a journalist gets tortured to death. Should you be put on trial? I'm not sure why not tbh.
And when you self-host, worst case scenario is running a disaster recovery exercise on a different cloud provider. (Except for DNS, where you're at the mercy of the registrar; you might need to communicate a new domain name to your users.)
It's just time to leave Microsoft. Don't make excuses for rich corporations.
I think this is the wrong question when scoping to this problem, as governance and politics are not static. A favorable country to operate out of today is perhaps not favorable tomorrow. I think the better question is: "How do you operate an open source project with global contributors in a way that makes you censorship resistant?"
You should have no single point of failure, folks should be signing their commits (cryptographic integrity), build the merkle tree, make it broadly consumable, etc. If a POP gets nuked, you bring up a replacement and keep on chuggin', just like if you were The Pirate Bay, Archive.today, Libgen, Z-Library, etc. Some similarities to how the AT Protocol is structured (Commits->PDS->Firehose->AppView) [1]. Commits go in, views of the project are available globally, the data corpus is stored in a durable, distributed fashion.
https://mastodon.social/@organicmaps/114155428924741370