Issue #1,124 | Inside the Business of CAD | 28 February 2022
Someone once said that software eats the world, but now software is being eaten by war.
Europe and North America ought to be at the front lines helping defend the borders of Ukraine against the Russian invasion, but for Western leaders steeped in a “The End of History” mindset, such a move is inconceivable. Better to lead from behind with sanctions.
Sanctions are, nevertheless, useful as an initial counter-attack against the evil that desires to kill fellow humans to satisfy its greed for moar empire. This is not the way of Christ, even when the Russian Orthodox believe Moscow to be the Third Rome, Kyiv to be the spiritual mother of Rus, and the Ukrainian Orthodox church an illegitimate breakaway sect.
When sanctions, like BDS, are small, we barely notice the impact; in this case, however, they are against the world’s second largest energy exporter, and — significantly for our industry — the source for many contract programmers who create, debug, and update the CAD software we use. As is Ukraine.
(China, also a major outsourcing center, may well one day also be cut off, as its leader continues his reckless pursuit of territorial expansion.)
How might war in Ukraine and sanctions with Russia affect software? I asked some CAD-related firms.
A North American developer:
“As of February 25, there are no sanctions in place that would block our ability to work with programmers based in Russia; the current sanctions affect only specific Russian banks.
“The situation with programmers based in Ukraine is unstable right now, as people are rightfully concerned about their own lives and the lives of their families, and work necessarily takes a back seat.”
A Russian developer:
“The war in Ukraine is a big tragedy for both our nations. The only hope is that this will stop as soon as possible.
“We keep operating as a company on a regular level, but some actions are not a top priority now.”
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As for upFront.eZine Publishing, our policy is that we work with individuals, not politicians. We have clients in Russia, with whom we continue to work.
At one time we had clients in China. By 2015, however, we came to realize that the Chinese Communist Party is embedded in all companies, and cancelled our work there.
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Kyochi Myogo reminds us that the war against Ukraine is not an isolated event, sadly. “People who don’t know or care what’s going on in, for example, Yemen, Myanmar, or Sudan, but who are very worked up about Ukraine, should ask themselves why that’s the case.” The horror is everywhere.
Countering the horror takes courage. David Burge notes that “the most courageous leadership seen in this world in the last 40 years has come from a coal miner, a satirist, and a comedian: Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel, and Volodmyr Zelensky.”
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