github-do-not-ban-us

This repository is a public letter and community petition addressed to GitHub, created by Iranian developers in response to GitHub restricting their accounts in 2019. It contains no software to install or run. Its purpose was to document the problem, rally support, and apply pressure for policy changes.

The issue started when GitHub began enforcing US trade sanctions, which resulted in developers in Iran, Crimea, Cuba, Syria, and North Korea losing access to parts of the platform. Iranian developers specifically objected to two aspects: the restrictions were applied without warning, and GitHub banned accounts based on the history of IP addresses used, meaning Iranians living abroad were caught in the ban regardless of where they currently lived.

The petition asked GitHub to allow affected users to make their private repositories and private gists public before losing access, to stop restricting users based on nationality rather than current location, and to issue a public apology in the way Slack had done when it faced a similar situation. The README includes updates noting that several of these requests were eventually addressed, and the campaign was formally closed in August 2019.

To demonstrate the scale of Iranian participation in open-source software, the README lists well-known projects built by Iranian developers, including HarfBuzz (a text shaping library used across many operating systems), intro.js (a widely used onboarding tour library), and fl_chart (a popular Flutter chart package). A link to a more complete catalog is also included.

The repository was translated into over fifteen languages by volunteers and gathered more than eleven thousand stars as a show of solidarity from the global developer community. The full README is longer than what was shown.