Chinese Citizens Annoyed And Angered By Notepad++ Decision To 'Free Uyghur'

In the world of computing, programmers tend to be far from any political affairs. And the tools they use, should not be affected by any political views.

But Notepad++, the popular text editor and source code editor for use with Microsoft Windows, has its developer released an update on version 7.8.1 with the codename: “Free Uyghur.” This decision has angered many Chinese netizens, who blame the developer from turning the tool into just another fracture in the already-fraught relationship between the West and China.

In a blog post announcing the updated version, developer Don Ho wrote how "human rights in China is always a hotly contested topic", saying that:

"The Uyghurs are not ethnically Chinese but live in China’s so-called autonomous Xinjiang region. The region’s name suggests the Uyghurs have autonomy and self-governance. But similarly to Tibet, Xinjiang is a tightly controlled region of China. After the recent Xinjiang conflict, Beijing has recast the Uyghur ethnic group as a terrorist collective. This has allowed Beijing to justify its transformation of Xinjiang into a surveillance state. There has also been a marked rise of Islamophobia across China."

While protests involving Uyghur have been around in the real world for more than many times, Ho's announcement and decision has brought the protests to GitHub, the popular open-source platform, that hosts Notepad++.

Since the announcement, the GitHub's 'issues' page has been bombarded with spam, much of it was written in Chinese language.

“Stop sending meaningless political-related issues, it just makes you look like an idiot,” said one person. Another simply wrote, “Bye ! Uninstall.” There are also curses and mockeries.

Not only that people were complaining about Notepad++'s political views, GitHub was also attacked, as its servers were targeted by Distributed-Denial-of Service attacks (DDoS). Fortunately, the platform remained intact provided by its anti-DDoS protection.

[block:block=87]
Notepad++ Free Uyghur

Ho continued by saying:

"At least 120,000 members of Kashgar’s Muslim Uyghur minority have been detained in Xinjiang’s re-education camps which aim to change the political thinking of detainees, their identities, and their religious beliefs. Reports from the World Uyghur Congress submitted to the United Nations in July 2018 suggest that 1 million Uyghurs are currently being held in the re-education camps."

"The fact you have just learned such information is already an action in and of itself. But you can involve more people to focus on this issue and hopefully apply additional pressure on the Chinese government to stop their oppressive actions and crimes concerning the Uyghur people."

"People will tell me again to not mix politics with software/business. Doing so surely impacts the popularity of Notepad++: talking about politics is exactly what software and commercial companies generally try to avoid. The problem is, if we don’t deal with politics, politics will deal with us. We can choose to not act when people are being oppressed, but when it’s our turn to be oppressed, it will be too late and there will be no one for us. You don’t need to be Uyghur or a Muslim to act, you need only to be a human and have empathy for our fellow humans."

Previously, GitHub was also accused for banning Iranian developers on its platform, due to it limiting users' access from U.S. sanctioned countries. At that time, one Iranian developer presumably thought that GitHub accused him for "developing nuclear weapons".