Secondly, not everything and everyone from Russia is bad. But if you subscribe to that narrative, good for you and good luck finding a tool that comes close to JetBrains.
Could you point me to a couple videos of Czech JB devs talking at Czech conferences in Czech?
Asking seriously. Because I was a russian speaking Ukrainian until recently and used to listen to tech podcasts and talks in russian all the time, for years, starting back when JB products just started gaining popularity. Not once was the company or it's products regarded as Czech by russians. It was always talked about as russian, all the podcast guests from JB were russian, all the conf speakers were russian.
Now, it wouldn't be the first time russians appropriated something that wasn't theirs. Which is why I'm asking if there are actually any signs of JB operating in Czechia outside of company being registered there. All I can find is JetbrainsCZ youtube channel with whopping 44 views on its single office walk video.
They say they had three R&D offices (out of 6) in Russia and closed them in March 2022.[1] 131 out of 161 open positions on their career page list Prague as one of the possible locations.[2]
Why should an multinational IT company aiming at developers talk in a local language? How does a heritage of founders matters? Google is half a russian company by that metric, as in "Sergey Brin".
JetBrains is a Czech company because it was created in Czech Republic and is operated from Czech Republic. They've had significant development resources in pre-war Russia, like many big companies, because it was a cheap and good. As the war started, they've rescued whoever they could and closed their russian offices.
The war started in Feb 2014, just saying. JB closed offices only when they become afraid of getting squashed by new USA secondary sanctions, not because they opposed war.
Depending on what you count you could give a number of other dates, some significantly earlier than 2014. The current massive offensive, which is significant enough that pointing out they reacted then and not in 2014 or some other date is at best being facetious & disingenuous, started in force in Feb 2022.
JetBrains where silent when the war started. I was a bit worried what would happen. Then they announced the closing of the dev offices in Russia. They said that they needed to extract some people before announcing. It’s not an easy task relocating hundreds of people.
Well, there we go. The grandparent comment argued that JB is a russian company (as in employing mostly russians) and it may not be a right thing to do continuing to pay pretty salaries to people responsible at the very least for letting their country slip into genocidal fascism, while they enjoy their new life in Europe and the regime they helped raise continues murdering Ukrainians and kidnapping their children.
> Could you point me to a couple videos of Czech JB devs talking at Czech conferences in Czech?
Do you have examples of them not talking Czech at Czech conferences? Not talking a particular local language at an international conference is not a significant metric IMO. A great many companies from all over the world send people out to speak English (or at least American!) at conferences. As a linguistically ignorant Englishman this is rather useful to me, but it doesn't make those companies not French, not German, not Indian, not Chinese, etc.
Heck, if (caveat: speculation, I've not looked into this at all) Russian is a common enough second language in the country (or at least amongst local+visiting delegates for conferences about these subjects) then some talks at a conference in the Czech Republic being in Russian would not be surprising, much like you see many talks in English/American countries where English is not an official language (and similar for other languages that are significantly more common if you count people with them as second+ languages as well as native speakers).
> used to listen to tech podcasts
The issue is more acute with podcasts than conferences: the audience is international, so they might not have the luxury of using their native language while serving a large enough target audience.
> Because I was a russian speaking … listen to tech podcasts and talks in russian all the time
I see much room for confirmation bias here. What reason would they have, beyond national pride which is valid of course, to make a point of explaining “we aren't Russian BTW” on a Russian language podcast? Especially give that could be seen as a bit of a down-play of the Russian audience if national pride works the other way against them.
This sort of fundamentalism isn't what stimulates societies to make peace, which you ostensibly want. The way to peace is tolerance and getting Russia to see that too, not drawing lines in the sand and beating your chest. That leads to more war. It is easy to see examples of this, as the US has been doing this for as long as it's existed (at least, when it wasn't at war with itself - and even then).
If you think what the US did in the middle east was bad, you ABSOLUTELY should stop helping america profit. Just because nobody has the balls to actually punish america for the horseshit we have pulled, doesn't mean it's not the correct thing to do.
