Don't tell Git

The problems of the most important service for developers show: the Internet in Russia is breaking even without the direct efforts of Roskomnadzor

The service for GitHub developers is working worse and worse in Russia. Deputy Anton Gorelkin in his Telegram channel urges Russian users to look for alternative resources. In addition, it should be clarified that GitHub itself is generally not bad, but it discriminates against citizens. Roskomnadzor, in turn, clarifies: no special actions were taken to impose restrictions.

These statements are a clear demonstration of the real mess.

The Internet is breaking, but no one knows exactly why.

Before we begin to understand the intricacies, it is worth noting that the topic is unlikely to fall into the category of mandatory. Subjectively, a person who is not deeply and professionally involved in development does not need to know about this, to put it mildly. Even more so for a State Duma deputy. And if you have nothing to do with programming, then most likely this is the first time you’ve heard the name GitHub.

And this is an important resource. It combines two functions. The first is a code repository that supports versioning of changes, which is necessary when more than one person is involved in development. Copies, branches, comments on changes - all this is stored on remote servers and allows you to do a simple thing: if something goes wrong, you can always roll back. The second is a social network for code. You can share your work with others and get feedback. If your work is open, anyone can use it for their own needs. And this is already a world standard.

This was the case until recently. Today, with the spread of artificial intelligence, the popularity of such projects is beginning to decline. Today the trend is “GitHub for AI”, like Entire.io.

But where does all the fuss come from? How did a specialized resource fall into disgrace?

To begin with, I would like to hope that there really was no direct attack or attempts to block - in any case, no cases or direct statements by interested parties. But still, some users begin to complain about access problems. The real reason is most likely trivial: GitHub “fell under a horse.” I mean, they blocked something else, but they hit it tangentially.

You need to understand: such services, despite the laconic and seemingly simple description, are large and distributed monsters inside. Everything will be done to ensure that nothing interferes with the main task - the development of software products. There is fault tolerance, many related solutions, and integration with other services. Any accident - and this happens even without Roskomnadzor - and the work of thousands of programmers is stopped for a short time. As practice shows, ensuring fault tolerance is much more difficult than breaking it. Maybe domestic TSPUs didn’t like one IP address - that’s all. This is just an example.

Another, somewhat comical aspect of this story: Russia owes all its existing sovereignty, from Russian office suites to Linux builds, to open source code hosted on GitHub.

Everything that is used today in one way or another is formally modified someone else’s solutions. As always, they didn’t come up with anything of their own here. And despite the payment problems, the service is still the main infrastructure for the code. There is no large-scale replacement for it and no longer is in sight. Or rather, formally there are alternatives. For example, GitVerse from Sber. There are also migration tools. Theoretically, I pressed a couple of buttons and transferred my project. But in practice everything is different. Moving a project takes time and preparation, and even if everything is done correctly, something will break and you will have to repair, correct, rewrite, restore.

So, in a good way,

GitHub was supposed to be one of the main candidates for whitelisting. But he didn't.

Let's watch our hands: Microsoft, the owner of the service, is clearly not taking any special actions against Russian users - everything is within the framework of the current sanctions policy. And Roskomnadzor, it seems, is telling the truth: there were no special instructions to block anything. Yes, some individual pages may be blocked, but everything should work together.

But it began to work worse. Updates are not rolled out, errors are not fixed, programmers are on their toes, managers are screaming, owners are crying. Then, of course, everything gets better, somehow it starts to work, and everyone calms down. Until next time, which could come at any moment. So much for development in conditions of degradation.

In the end, the big picture looks like this:

execution of some government decisions is impossible. Everyone and everyone is already talking publicly about the fiasco with blocking traffic tunneling tools.

It doesn't look good when your orders are not followed. But some turned out to be stubborn, so the regulator’s pressure on the Russian segment does not stop. Everything would be fine, but there is one nuance - the rest begins to crumble, quite secure and legal, which, in addition to problems visible to the naked eye, adds arguments for protest rhetoric, including loyal groups.

This spring has shown: Russia will not face either the Chinese scenario, or the Iranian Internet, or its absence, as in North Korea. The country chose its own path here too: break everything and drown in rubble. Which might not be such a bad thing. Life is not GitHub, you can’t roll back to the previous version.