The Impact of Sanctions on GitHub Developers and Activities
Youmei Fan, Ani Hovhannisyan, Hideaki Hata, Christoph Treude, Raula Gaikovina Kula
TL;DR
This paper investigates how government sanctions affect GitHub developers and their activity using a large-scale, longitudinal dataset of 156,493 users and 41 million activity points across eight regions from 2008 to 2022. It combines data from the GitHub API and GraphQL to track annual contributions, focusing on sanctioned regions (Iran, Crimea, Cuba, Syria) and baselines (Russia, Greece, Kenya, Hong Kong), and analyzes changes around the 2019–2020 sanctions period. The findings show that many sanctioned developers navigated restrictions and, once sanctions were lifted, most resumed contributing rather than abandoning GitHub, with 96% of previously withdrawn users returning. The study highlights GitHub’s pivotal role in sustaining global open-source contributions and provides empirical insight into how platform resilience interacts with policy-imposed restrictions, suggesting avenues for future inquiries into causality and broader regional effects.
Abstract
The GitHub platform has fueled the creation of truly global software, enabling contributions from developers across various geographical regions of the world. As software becomes more entwined with global politics and social regulations, it becomes similarly subject to government sanctions. In 2019, GitHub restricted access to certain services for users in specific locations but rolled back these restrictions for some communities (e.g., the Iranian community) in 2021. We conducted a large-scale empirical study, collecting approximately 156 thousand user profiles and their 41 million activity points from 2008 to 2022, to understand the response of developers. Our results indicate that many of these targeted developers were able to navigate through the sanctions. Furthermore, once these sanctions were lifted, these developers opted to return to GitHub instead of withdrawing their contributions to the platform. The study indicates that platforms like GitHub play key roles in sustaining global contributions to Open Source Software.