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There is an interesting take that Russian part of the Yandex group opensources as much as possible, in order for the overseas companies of the group to leverage technologies without legal or financial ties with Russia.

For me this seems very plausible, as for the last year they first did everything to distance from anything related to politics (e. g. they sold their news and their blogging platform to the basically state-owned VK), and then to separate Russian and overseas businesses as much as possible.



It does look like Clickhouse transmogrified from a Russia-based Yandex open-source project into a San Francisco-based VC-back C-corp incorporated in Delaware just in the nick of time.

(Not suggesting this is wrong. I'm just offering an interpretation based on skimming public blog posts over the past ~2 years.)


Yandex is incorporated in the Netherlands and the founders live in Israel.

I think they will create several spin-off open source companies (like ClickHouse Inc.) outside Russia to continue doing B2B business with the outside world.


They did some time ago actually.

Like https://nebius.com/about for example.

Not to mention that Yandex been operation in countries outside of Russia under different name from the beginning (like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yango_(ride_sharing))


Unforytunately, only one founder, Arkady Volozh, is still alive. Ilya Segalovich has died 10 years ago.


It doesn't matter where the company is incorporated -- when Kremlin wants the access to the data Yandex cannot say no. One cannot operate in Russia and not play by Kremlin rules, especially media companies.


russian Yandex no longer belongs to original Yandex founders/owners - it belongs to and is controlled by kremlin.

makes sense that original engineers/founders create their own stuff via opensourcing their original work


Then why original Yandex founder is under EU sanctions?

Spoiler: because until June 22 (effectively until the sanctions hit) he was a Yandex CEO and owner of 8% shares (45% voting shares).

There is no "almighty Kremlin" that owns everything. There is, however, a set of rules you must comply to if you want to do multibillion dollar business in Russia. You either bend, or sell your business to more complacent oligarchs. Durov chose the latter, Volozh chose the first.


Yandex has definitely made it extremely easy to leverage their tech, by selecting to use the Apache 2.0 license.


Would be a clever move but I have doubts that no longer Yandex has much to say in Russian Yandex. The latter seems very close to the Kremlin now.




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