With the war in the Ukraine unfolding, I started wondering about tools and libraries that might be affected by the crisis. What happens to open source projects that are caught in the cross fire of war?

The first such item that sprung to mind was Nginx. It’s used by an enormous amount of the modern web as a reverse proxy and load balancer.

Nginx is one of the biggest open source successes in recent memory, and as far as I know it’s developed by russian based developers. Looking at their website it appears they self host all development rather than use a git SaaS platform like Github.

Nginx has already been in the news in the past couple of years for similar issues. Thankfully the code is open source, but it’s clear that developing safe and reliable software for a world wide ecosystem is not very straight forward.

With the US and many countries imposing sanctions on Russia, how will that affect the open source communities online?

I don’t have an answer to that question, but it’s something I’m looking out for.

My best wishes to both Ukrainian and Russian developers, I hope you aren’t caught up in the madness of war.

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