There are international sanctions againts russia, because of the attact on ukraine - and I expect even more sanctions to come. Could that affect the development or the availability of Kotlin which is developed in Russia?
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My guess would be it shouldn’t affect availability as Kotlin is an open source project. I’m more concerned about commercial products like IntelliJ Ultimate, however, formally JetBrains is a Czech company, so hopefully it won’t be affected as well. Development may be more tricky.
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If that would really happen, and the purchase of IntelliJ IDEA would be forbidden in western countries, that would be effectively the end of Kotlin, because without a proper IDE, nobody would use this language anylonger in larger projects. Eclipse and VS Code are still far away from being competitive in this regard.
However, I don’t expect that, because IntelliJ IDEA is used widely by russias opponents.
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You seem to forgot about IntelliJ Community which is open source.
Anyway, this is only my two cents. I have no idea what will happen, I can only guess.
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Kotlin foundation is not related to Russia. And JetBrains is not registered in Russia. The worst thing that could happen is that work for Russian developers would be harder. So you do not have anything to worry about.
According to the latest JetBrains annual report, only small fraction of JetBrains income comes from Russia, so in the end, only Russia will suffer.
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Please do not panic. Keep calm and carry on.
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I wondered the same. Even if Jetbrains is officially registered in Czech, many of Kotlin developers, including main language architect, are likely Russians (by their names) residing in St Petersburg / Russia. Life for many such talented people will be now harder due to political decisions of their leader, they may have problem to get their salaries, and problems to work efficiently on the project. Maybe some of them will finally decide to emigrate so that they can keep working on what they love to do.
The seriousness of this matter do not fit at Kotlin Community forum, which focuses on technology development.
This matter is certainly being properly addressed by JetBrains’ managers and investors. Any opinion from us would be mere speculation.
I fully understand your concern for people, but keep in mind that the world is in a sensitive situation and even well-intentioned posts like this can rapidly scale to a flamewar.
Thus it probably would be better if this thread was locked.
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Yes, it could … as almost every discussion. But so far it is pretty calm here, I’d say.
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Hi. Reaching out with small chance of being useful but if it was, then hugely.
Wouldn’t the russian Kotlin team be willing to relocate to Brno? There already is a pretty large IT community - 2 IT faculties, Red Hat / JBoss, IBM dev center, Technology incubator, and a few others; and there’s one great office building available to lease (if necessary), freshly vacated by another development company. Brno is an international and welcoming (20 %) student city, with existing east-european community. And it’s 2h from Prague but not so expensive.
The developers of such gem Kotlin is should have peaceful conditions. Yes, I am making assumptions here that they aren’t. But things can go very wrong from here, and even St. Petersburg will suffer a lot from the iron curtain that’s being put on Russia.
Sorry for a slightly political post, it’s also my last to this topic; I just like Kotlin too much to see it being hindered because of politics. :-/
EDIT: And it’s here. Russia’s internet is being cut from the rest of the world. Act while you can - soon Russia’s borders will have barbed wire, minefield and towers with snipers. I remember it from CSSR - thousands of people died trying to escape the soviet region. Please act.
It looks like today is the day when Kotlin development is affected by the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, since JetBrains is “suspending sales and R&D activities in Russia indefinitely”!
I’m really curious what that would mean for Kotlin. But first of all it is important to end the Russian violence.
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I was afraid as well, but I don’t think so. JetBrains are officially based in Czechia and they have a huge offices in Munich as well. They also support Ukraine according to their tweet. However, I hope kotlin stays strong, since we in Tolgee have all our backend written in Kotlin and I think a lot of other, even American companies, have the same.
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I learned something new today.
I always thought JetBrains paid their employees and paid taxes in countries they operated. But seems it was all done at the expense of the state.
I always thought governments try to attract companies to their country, so they invest money and hire people, because it gives growth and wealth to the country. But I was wrong, companies just come to harvest, they suck resources of the country and monetize them for themselves.
My personal opinion is that JetBrains didn’t really decide to opt-out from Russia. In fact, in recent years they invested quite a lot there, they probably didn’t plan to change that and this is all for sure very hard for them. But well, Russia decided to opt-out from the civilized world. And yes, unfortunately many Russian people are victims of this situation.
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If not selling a burger is the terrorism, then I think we didn’t yet invent proper words for an act of deploying cluster bombs on civilian districts.
This is not about terrorism, intimidation and hatred. I don’t hate Russians, I think none of my friends do. But if Russians can’t anyhow stop their government from invading other countries, if many of them even support the invasion, then the only way to prevent future aggressions is to make them incapable of doing so. Which means either attacking them and starting WW3 or limiting economic relations, so they won’t be strong enough for as long as possible. If you know any other ways to make Russia not invade other countries in the future, then I’m all ears.
This is also a simple “we don’t like you, we don’t play with you” thing. You can’t expect children to play with a boy who bullies them. You can’t blame them for isolating such a person.
I don’t think companies cutting economic relations to Russia is a good idea, I find it very scary in fact. The less economic relations and social mobility there are between two countries the less barriers there are to them going to war.
Could you imagine USA and Canada going to war? No because there’s many Americans that are from Canada, have friends/family in Canada, have business in Canada, travel to Canada, etc. And vice versa from Canada to America.