Phoronix: Several Linux Kernel Driver Maintainers Removed Due To Their Association To Russia


Unknown parent

lemmy - Link to source

Allero

Kernel cannot follow or not follow any legal rules. Linux Foundation can.

And if regulations become a serious issue and go against the spirit of open-source, it is time to move the Foundation somewhere else.

Unknown parent

lemmy - Link to source

Allero

Comments do drastically differ between .ml and .world. On .ml, you'll see more sympathy towards Russia and China.

But the issue on hand is way bigger than that. It's importance is not in Russia getting sanctioned somewhere else - it's in the destruction of openness and trust in the open-source community, which has far more reaching consequences. What has been done is pretty unprecedented - and dangerous.

And I'm surprised other Linux communities are silent on the matter.

This entry was edited (6 months ago)
in reply to kixik

Actually I'm interested how it looks legally ( it somebody cares about it at all ). Whether the Russian contributors could ask to revert their changes as they most likely never signed the contract to transfer their code copyrights. For sure it will have a big impact on foss because if you have at least one American and Russian contributors, you may get in the biggest shitshow. Additionally if I was considering now to become a contributors, I'd be wondering if it's worthy at all to work for free and then to be banned no thanks for whole free work years
in reply to endofline

IANAL, but I think the general answer is no. When someone contribute code to an open source project, although they aren't giving up their copyright, they do grant the recipient (and the rest of the world, for that matter) a license to use their code. In case of Linux, this is the GNU Public License. Unless GPL has a section about license revocation that I am not aware of, you won't be able to take your code back.
This entry was edited (6 months ago)
Unknown parent

lemmy - Link to source

gnuhaut

Racists and Xenophobes will try to stop global collaboration,


Yes! Go on...

real conflict that matters will always be the smart vs the lowiq.


Uff... That's some serious brainworms right there. How do you call your worldview? IQ Supremacy?

Unknown parent

lemmy - Link to source

gnuhaut

Yeah better discriminate based on nationality /s. But why stop at that? Poor people are too easily bribed can't have them. I hear the CIA recruits from top US universities, can't trust those college grads either. Anyone belonging to some homophobic church or religious group? Better not what if they're closeted gay and get blackmailed? Anyone in a monogamous relationship should be excluded for the same reason, if you think about it. *tips forehead*
in reply to kixik

Linus is an absolute cunt for not only following this gleefully but then attributing pushback to "russian trolls" and "state propaganda" fuck you man.

These people weren't the MIT pricks who inserted vulnerabilities into the kernel, they were contributors who did hard work and helped advance FREE software. Linus is now turning his back on the GPL and manning it clear that Linux can be controlled by the US state on a whim.

Unknown parent

lemmy - Link to source

merthyr1831

he's just an American nationalist at heart. his dad was a member of the Russian communist party and his biography seemed to make clear that rebelled from that.

socially he's not terrible but when the war drums come beating he's stepping in line for the stars and stripes

This entry was edited (6 months ago)
Unknown parent

lemmy - Link to source

Vincent

No, I'm saying that if the banned people are only banned because they're associated with the Russian government (/employed by sanctioned companies), then I'm not going to get outraged over the kernel maintainers. I do not expect them to break the law just to die on this hill.
Unknown parent

lemmy - Link to source

Draconic NEO

I haven't made any arguments in this thread, you are putting words in my mouth, and not really helping your credibility. All I said is that the person should defederate Lemmy instances and communities which go against the mission of their instance. Something that almost all instance operators would likely agree on.

Just for the record though, I don't believe people should be kicked out of a project based on their nationality, that seems incredibly xenophobic. I don't know where you got that idea that I said any of those things from.

in reply to Draconic NEO

You're encouraging someone who wants to block "problematic instances" in this case people voicing opposition to that xenophobia, to host lemmy (an open source project where most instances have large linux communities), and taking them seriously on their concern trolling in the first place. It does send a bit of an unusual message.

Anyways I stand by it, that person should fuck off back to reddit.

in reply to Vincent

This is all hypothetical, they are calling everyone dismayed by this Russian bots, and it's clear this is happening in sync with US aggression against Chinese professors and tech workers in the west. Most of my comments here have been pretty independent of what you're saying anyways. The wider context which could even justify speculating about this where open source is beholden to western laws and corporate practices should be a wake up call to people.
in reply to Nanook

Misskey forks and Mastodon all have a file drive to manage things, thread watching, one-click access to LibreTranslate without browser extensions (good for libraries and school). Lemmy is really only good for the insane blood bowl of comments sections - and I literally have to use SearxNG lemmy comments plugin to sift through it because federation is so annoying. Though I am being harsh maybe. Eh honestly it's workable if you babysit every aspect of federation but it was never worth it to me. A.gup.pe is pretty much the best way to bridge Lemmy with Mastodon/Misskey/Friendica forks.

Let's be for real though, Mastodon's ecosystem is horrible. They all support mindless aggression against Russia and "Israel's right to exist" where Palestinians used to live side by side even with Zionists. The few people who stand up even for international law, which is based in US oriented institutions, are constantly lambasted, to the point even mild radical liberals like that German "immibis" guy are driven to their own instances.

FediMap shows why. Until server hosting is less concentrated in NATO countries you can expect more heavy handed neoconservative moderation. At least there are cool Brazilians.

Literally just use a Misskey fork, Funkwhale, and Peertube.

in reply to LukácsFan1917

This is all hypothetical


Yes, that is exactly my point: let's not get all worked up about something where we have almost zero facts. Although:

open source is beholden to western laws and corporate practices


is definitely the case for the Linux Foundation: it's beholden to US laws. And wake-up call or not, a foundation would always be incorporated somewhere, and beholden to the laws of that somewhere.

Unknown parent

lemmy - Link to source

pressanykeynow

There's definitely a lot of opposition to Russia's actions in the world but your comment sounds especially funny today when leaders of most of the world(including the UN Secretary General and even a certain NATO country President) are currently in Kazan, Russia on a global cooperation summit.
Unknown parent

lemmy - Link to source

vga

I'm not sure if you're kidding, so I'll just note that Finland and Iceland are NATO member states, and Finland is notoriously against Russian aggressions due to history.
This entry was edited (6 months ago)
in reply to kixik

Also from seemingly reasonable commenters there are many arguments around security coming up. I don't get how one can jump to that idea? This obviously has nothing to do with security, it's about sanction compliance. And yes, likely a pretty pointless sanction compliance in this instance, as the sanctioned entities don't have a direct benefit from having an employee name mentioned in the kernel. However that's not how sanctions work, both just because, and also intuitively it makes sense: Sanctions wouldn't be enforcable at scale if every single case would have to be judged on merit - it's hard enough to enforce them as is.

And btw I so hope most of the comments on here are Russian trolls, but I fear many are people that fully drunk the Russian trolls' cool-aid and are now fully brainwashed...

This entry was edited (6 months ago)
in reply to Allero

i don't know what exactly was in question in the kernel, that the lawyers had to worry about, but From EAR rules...
"note that open source software can still be subject to export control measures if it includes technologies or functionalities that are regulated. In such cases, specific controls may be applied to prevent the unauthorized export of these technologies or functionalities."

IF something was deemed controlled, it makes sense to pull it so kernel can ship anywhere, and whomever received it can do their own tweaks

Unknown parent

lemmy - Link to source

LukácsFan1917

That's so cute that you think that anyone who doesn't eat out of the hand of Google News is brainwashed by Putin. You're such a critical thinker. Thank you for weighing in.

Actually the difference between me and people like you is I actually read what Washington and Kiev are saying about the war and have memory longer than a goldfish! Plus, I avoid search engines that have gone under heavy censorship since February 2022 by groups like Alliance to Secure Democracy. I have far more cogent criticism of the Russian government and their media, their central bank, and MOD than anyone like you, or most of the supporters of the SMO. Mainly that they let the west get away with a Nazi coup in Ukraine in 2014 and sat on their hands.

Of course support for the Ukrainians has nothing to do with western propaganda LOL, you have no choice whether America and its sub-imperial partners in Europe, Australia, Japan, and South Korea send supplies and funding to the Ukrainians. It doesn't make any difference whether you buy the propaganda or not. These same thinks tanks that call for a war in Ukraine are now discovering that western industrial capacity cannot be restored and falls far short of doing anything other than delaying Ukraine losing.

The economic shock of the coronavirus pandemic has now rolled into the mass realignment caused by sanctioning Russia. Sanctions place a burden on all countries which are expected to abide by them. Outside of western countries which constitute 14% of the world population, people are ambivalent about the Anti Terrorist Operation Against Donbas Separatists entering year TEN, they only care about the western financial system being turned into a weapon against them.

In fact, even American vassals like Europe and Japan are becoming more cagey about war. It certainly is not inspiring the hardcore faction of the Taiwanese about war with China.

in reply to LukácsFan1917

friendly fire is common on the lemmyverse and i think it's because of the reddit liberals; they've managed to get almost every single reddit refugee to self sort into a few instances to protect their delicate sensibilities so they're incredibly well organized and funded, or they're EXTREMELY dedicated individuals to the point of doing it full time for free.
Unknown parent

lemmy - Link to source

Solar Bear

You're greatly overestimating how many people that is; additionally, it was largely people that aren't very committed to FOSS that got mad. The project maintainers and most users are fine with it. People who are committed to FOSS ideals are overwhelmingly progressive to leftist. That's why those codes of conduct were added in the first place, and were largely uncontroversial amongst most actual contributors of those projects.
This entry was edited (6 months ago)
in reply to Solar Bear

The projects that have those codes of conduct are the ones where any reactionary maintainers could be overruled. You have to look to the projects that have never had codes of conduct, the old guard and Incelie techbro spaces. Brave's CEO is a homophobe, for example. This has been known for years, he still makes homophobic comments. Brave does not have a code of conduct or community guidelines. And basically anyone that notices and tries to address an issue like racism or transphobia with a repo suddenly finds a mass of reactionaries coming out of the woodwork.
in reply to Allero

I can't stress how much the western supremacists are off the rails on this one: agreeing with the standard sanctions policy commonly used by the US, of punishing entire civilian populations based on the actions of their government, regardless of how you feel about that government and its actions.

Code is code, the nationality of the person shouldn't be used to exclude them. ppl know how most of us here feel about Israel but I would never even think of excluding an Israeli contributor to any of the projects I work on.

in reply to LukácsFan1917

@Oblique Obscurantist @Vincent I think bottom line is that it's bad for the open source community and something a grown adult like Linus should know better than to do even if it means moving his foundation to another nation. You can't be as critical to the open source movement and then bow to political pressures like this. The last estimate of Linus's personal worth was placed at 50 million, so not like he can't afford to move.

Linux reshared this.

in reply to Nanook

Lemmy needs way better management of uploads than a randomly created URL floating in the void. If you accidentally paste a picture of your face or dick it is just stuck there and you have to beg an admin to help. You don't even have to hit post.

Oh yeah I skipped over the Nazi microblog instances because they are pretty isolated and infighty. It's the full throated imperialists who ban anyone who talks about the genocide like anyone is responsible for it but the Palestinians.

They do actually often use EU laws to back up their censorship. They of course would never consider other hosting options. They are proud of the EU for some reason.

But whatever if that's what people decide "Mastodon" is going to be like there is a lot more to be done with ActivityPub services other than link it to your chosen flavor of microblogging, and it certainly doesn't need to have the sheen of Eugene Rotchko on it haha

This entry was edited (6 months ago)
in reply to BCsven

@BCsven As I stated though moot, the laws have really outlived their usefulness. There are simply too many unsecured systems on the Internet to make it impossible for a bad foreign actor to gain access to any software that is not intended for export. When I worked for the local telco, many of their switches had dial-in modems that connected to the recent change channels, the channels that allow you to alter how lines were assigned, telephone calls were routed, etc, without so much as a login or password. If you knew the commands you could do pretty much anything you wanted to. I caused a major meltdown that got me an unwanted interview with directors merely for suggesting that they put a password on the root account of a pbx interface Unix system used to serve a 40,000 line customer. So yea security is mostly a joke and as a result these laws serve no useful purpose.

Linux reshared this.

in reply to Nanook

Oh I get the futility of it. But if you are in the USA you are bound by it. Same reason encryption devs had to cross to Canada to do development because USA would not allow encryption code shared across boundaries.
Or how I once sent a software bug report in for an Engineering product; because company is USA based they assigned it an ITAR /EAR status. It was a 4" cube I modelled, and now some dev has to treat it as sensitive EAR data. LOL
This entry was edited (6 months ago)
Unknown parent

lemmy - Link to source

fruitycoder

The latest report that I saw was Russian attrition was nearing a collapsing rate in which the expected experience and levels of fatigue of renenforcments were to mean the expected casualty rates would climb exponentially on their side.
in reply to fruitycoder

That's interesting because I remember reading that in 2022. Meanwhile Zelensky is publicly threatening to deploy "3 secret weapons" which he apparently discussed behind closed doors with western leaders who are responding negatively to this pronouncement (indicating an unwillingness to escalate)

Let's be for real, Russia could tac nuke a non NATO Eastern European country in response to whatever dual use weapons zelensky is talking about with a nuclear payload, and their chief worry would probably be the global backlash, not the threat of strategic nukes

Put down the washing machine memes and listen to the quieter admissions of Ukrainian soldiers. That's how I saw them throwing civilian bodies into a pit, gloating, before editing 30 min later to claim they took it off a Russian phone (despite visible armbands). Morale is breaking down, conscription is failing versus the Russian mercenary and volunteer partial mobilization. There is no political change coming in Moscow.

in reply to LukácsFan1917

@Oblique Obscurantist @fruitycoder I don't think political change is even desirable, contrasted with Dmitry Medvedev and especially with Boris Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev before him and pretty much the farther back you go the worse it gets, Konstantin Chernenko, Yuri Andropov, I mean farther back you go the worse they get. I think Putin really has been the most willing to work with us if we had only returned the same in kind, as any Russian leader in history. As for political change, though I do not think it will come as a result the political will of the people, sure he has his detractors but think most people are not unhappy with him, where it's likely to come is simply the fact that he is 72 years old, we don't know the state of his health or how long it will hold up.

Linux reshared this.

Unknown parent

lemmy - Link to source

fruitycoder

Allegiance is another thing. Russian citizens unfortunately are subject to Russian law and the influence of the agencies.

Maintainer is more than a contributer in that it is a position of trust, which is called into question when they and their computer systems are subject to a belligerent governments jurisdiction.

Unknown parent

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Nanook

@Tinidril If it were not for our input I kind of doubt that would be the case.

You know we are at a precipice, we have the technology now to really make this world a nice place, or we can fight over what are mostly obsolete resources and turn it into a hellscape. I would prefer the former but obviously you and a lot of others prefer the latter.

Linux reshared this.

Unknown parent

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Nanook

@Tinidril I would be against that too but that is not the reason they invaded the Ukraine. I know someone who was born in Kiev, then lived in Moscow Russia, then moved to the United States, so he identifies with both sides of the conflict and just wants to see it end, but that's not happen as long as we continue to turn it into a proxy war with Russia.

Linux reshared this.

Unknown parent

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Nanook

@Tinidril He was backed into a corner and so he fought, he gave plenty of indications of what would happen, we ignored them, he followed through with exactly what he said he would do. If we'd followed through with what we said we would do and not advanced NATO past East Germany, then all Raytheon and company wouldn't be racking in the dollars killing people now.

Linux reshared this.

Unknown parent

lemmy - Link to source

0x0

The US is the most belligerent nation on earth, shall we ban american contributors? How about israeli?

Should their code be removed from the kernel?

The real question i haven't seen answered is Who owns the kernel code. Torvalds owns the Linux™ but that's to prevent others from buying it, but i was under the impression the source code is owned by all those who contribute to it and not whoever happens to be employing Torvalds at the time. Or is it a matter of where git.kernel.org/ happens to be hosted?

I'd suggest Codeberg but that's in Germany, so maybe another forgejo instance hosted maybe in Switzerland.

This entry was edited (6 months ago)
Unknown parent

lemmy - Link to source

0x0

Russia might invade Finland.


Finland's part or NATO now. Putin may be a lot of things, stupid ain't one of them. Ironically, this kinda backfired on him but can't say it was unexpected considering most scandinavians love the american dream.