Quietly merged into this week's Linux 6.12-rc4 kernel was a patch that removes a number of kernel maintainers from being noted in the official MAINTAINERS file that recognizes all of the driver and subsystem maintainers.www.phoronix.com
Being Russian => banned from doing business with the rest of the world
That's pretty straight forward to me.
I have seen pictures of Linus Torvads so I feel that I am uniquely qualified to explain whats going on. Let me break it down for you.
The Linux Kernel is meeting compliance requirements by removing Russian maintainers.
Thank you all and have a good night.
The problem is they aren't even saying what those requirements are even after numerous inquiries about it.
Don't you think its wrong to ban someone only because of their nationality? I mean for real man. Every country in the world has done some fucked up shit but open source software is supposed to go beyond politics and ideologies.
They weren't doing anything malicious it was wrong to remove them.
NATO will continue expanding as more and more border countries don't want to deal with limp dick Putin. Russia will be broken up to small territories and anything that remains of the federation will be scrapped and sold for salvage to finance rebuilding what has been lost.
Ta-ta!
Dude seriously and I can't believe how many people don't seem to see how sad that is in this thread.
Even if you hate this country or that, not even responding about it and keeping the code and using it anyway and only removing the attribution to the maintainers they removed (although that will escalate to banning them altogether I imagine this seems like a step one kind of thing) is just salt on the wound .
Super sad shit honestly.
Couldn’t think of a more lemmy thread topic than one involving both Russian geopolitics and linux.
part of me is sad that there aren't many .worlders defending blocking those evil tankies. lol
The War in Ukraine Was Provoked—and Why That Matters to Achieve Peace
The shooting war in Ukraine began with Yanukovych’s overthrow nine years ago, not in February 2022 as the U.S. government, NATO, and the G7 leaders would have us believe.
So many people forget that the Ukrainian Russian conflict never really ended, the idea that it was an unprovoked invasion is absurd, (and no, before someone decides to make a braindead comment, provoked does not mean justified.) There have been many leaked videos pre-invasion of violence towards both sides, and neither side made a proper effort to actually quell it, only surface level bullshit inorder to take the "moral ground:
@theunknownmuncher @Samueru Like Russia placing nukes in Cuba guaranteed we wouldn't invade it?
The thing about not being willing to learn from history is that you are then destined to repeat the same mistakes.
It is a tricky topic that is hard to get right. For instance the CoreJS dev is Russian and he is maintaining a library that is depended on by a large number of counties.
In general I support any action to further distance Russia but I can understand how the Russian maintainers feel. After all they may or may not support Russia.
The likely cause of this was the fact that it looks bad on paper for Linux to have Russian involvement. After all that's where all the "hackers" live. Somehow I think this was probably in response to a threat behind closed doors.
I also would be concerned about counties trying to compromise foss but unfortunately that is just as likely to come from the US as it is from Russia.
@Possibly linux @BobGnarley One would hope there are enough checks and balances such a major opensource project as Linux to keep malware out of the kernel regardless of who contributes to it, but we do there have been some instances where that was not the case.
I see the evolution of the Internet as humanity growing a nervous system, and anything that gets in the way of that as negative.
removed
Or that's what this would be on Lemmy.ml. They are all tankies and they get mad when you point out terrible things like facts.
You're trying to push this "Actuall, but Ukraine DID provoke" narrative by mixing in unverified, ideologically biased material with references that are legitimate, but isolated incidents. Like linking far-right activity to justify the war conveniently ignores Russia’s (I should probably say everyone's) own far-right issues. Marxists should reject imperialism in all its forms, including Russia’s actions in Ukraine.
Dude, WHAT. This is totally against what Linux and Open source in general stand for.
I don't support the thing that I'm sure was their reason for this but I definitely don't support banning someone from contributing to an open system solely off nationality.
So what eventually only the "good guys" can contribute to and use open source software? Who exactly decides who the "good guys" are in this scenario? USA? China?
The implications of what this can cause in the future for potentially all of the open source community is absolutely sad. We should welcome all our fellow human beings to contributing to open source.
Reminds me of a comment the other day on a post about Ventoy. Whatever the situation there is, which definitely needs clarification still, the person was saying that you shouldn't trust it at all because the maintainer is Chinese, even though he has emigrated away. Because the CCP will be able to leverage his family still there to force him to create a backdoor.
That's just thinly veiled racism in my opinion.
That's plain racism honestly.
I knew a (asian) guy who was working for a government contractor serving the US military. The racism is very serious to say the least. He got framed when something went down and was almost tried with treason. (that carries the death penalty) The authorities hit him with questions about his loyalty to the US for 5 hours even though he grew up in the US and so did his parents.
Where is that argument wrong, though?
Think about how completely unacceptable binary blobs are for most people in this community. And now comes a guy who for no reason whatsoever puts a binary blob of unclear origin into a project that can be used to inject code on a bootloader level. And that's somehow okay?
And the threat of the CCP is real. Look at the xz situation. The Chinese agencies are willing and capable to invest a lot of money to get access to systems, and they also have a track record of taking families essentially hostage (or just taking the target hostage directly, if they happen to visit).
Don't you understand that China is ruled by an evil party? The maintainer could be the nicest bloke in existence, with the best intentions and highest intellect - but if he can be pressured by a dictatorship, that's a problem. And that's not even a personal thing, I wouldn't blame him for giving in to the pressure - I would cave in too, probably.
You have to grow up and don't just throw around racism for everyone you don't like. That's not helpful and actually diminishes actual racism.
It's about sanctions, simple as that.
You guys love to walk yourself on how super friendly open source is and that utopia is juuust around the corner, if everyone would finally switch to Arch.
But the reality is, that it's straight up illegal for the Linux foundation to deal with Russians. Yes, that sucks for a lot of people, but that's exactly the point of sanctions. Every time some NSA adjacent entity contributes anything to Linux, you all get hysterical, but people living under an openly fascist regime, that is willing to kill literally millions of people, having write access to core infrastructure, that they are known to attack is perfectly fine? You really don't see the problem here?
You still act like open source exists on a plane removed from everything else. Linux is critical infrastructure, it runs all critical infrastructure. We have to act like it.
During the 1932 Holodomor Famine, the USSR sent aid to affected regions in an attempt to alleviate the famine. According to Mark Tauger in his article, The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933:
While the leadership did not stop exports, they did try to alleviate the famine. A 25 February 1933 Central Committee decree allotted seed loans of 320,000 tons to Ukraine and 240,000 tons to the northern Caucasus. Seed loans were also made to the Lower Volga and may have been made to other regions as well. Kul'chyts'kyy cites Ukrainian party archives showing that total aid to Ukraine by April 1933 actually exceeded 560,000 tons, including more than 80,000 tons of food
Some bring up massive grain exports during the famine to show that the Soviet Union exported food while Ukraine starved. This is fallacious for a number of reasons, but most importantly of all the amount of aid that was sent to Ukraine alone actually exceeded the amount that was exported at the time.
Aid to Ukraine alone was 60 percent greater than the amount exported during the same period. Total aid to famine regions was more than double exports for the first half of 1933.
According to Tauger, the reason why more aid was not provided was because of the low harvest
It appears to have been another consequence of the low 1932 harvest that more aid was not provided: After the low 1931, 1934, and 1936 harvests procured grain was transferred back to peasants at the expense of exports.
Tauger is not a communist, and ultimately this specific article takes the view that the low harvest was caused by collectivization (he factors in the natural causes of the famine in later articles, based on how he completely neglects to mention weather in this article at all its clear that his position shifted over the years). However, the Soviets really did try to alleviate the famine as best as they could. Maybe spend some time learning a bit of history instead of flaunting your ignorance in public.
Pretty much any that isn't Lemmy.ml, hexbear or lemmygrad. (And maybe beehaw.social as they have defederated from Lemmy.world)
Just look around and pick one.
Absolutely fair point. I agree with you on this portion of your comment.
Okay then, so describe the 2 sides and the punishments they deserved during the Nazi Germany invasion of Poland/Europe and the holocaust. I hate to bring Nazis into it as an argument, but you did say "ALL" and it easily shows how ridiculous that take is.
@theunknownmuncher Suggest you research the German economy at the time, who was controlling it, the relationship between Ashkanazi's and Jews and Germany for starters. Without understanding those complexities there is no way to understand that whole situation. Look into the history of the Rothchilds as it relates to all of this. This video at least provides some background: bitchute.com/video/1gWU5DaITVh…
Note: I mis-wrote Russian when I meant to say German. That said my original statement that all conflicts involve two parties doesn't dismiss the occasional psychopath as being one of those parties.
Nazi germany came into being a thing because post great war was massively hard on germans in large part to the treaty of versailles completely crippling germany's economy.
ofc there were other factors like the massive propaganda machine, Germany was effectively reduced to a slave state dealt a massive blow to the pride of the german populace which was fairly easy to turn young men militant alone, even disregarding the disastrous effects to the German economy.
there is simply no meaningful response to this
no matter whether you think russia is justified in invading ukraine or not, if russians get banned from the kernel bc russia invaded ukraine, yankees have to get the boot as well
YUP
so... maybe nobody should be banned and it sucks that this happened?
You should read the article because this is not a thing that has occurred, at least not yet.
my understanding was that the kernel didn't publicly state any specific reason, but "complying to sanctions" semms like a safe bet to me
in any case, whatever the reason, this removal is unfortunate and uncalled for
I'm sure removing these maintainers would be of great help to the Ukrainian war effort...
More seriously: We need to help Ukraine more. But this doesn't do that. It just hurts a bunch of people (both the maintainers, and the people using their code) for no benefit whatsoever.
100% agree with you! Like I said, I don't think we can hold all Russian people directly responsible for the actions of their government.
I wish for an ideal world where politics could stay out of Linux, but this is extremely tricky and cannot be treated black and white. Labeling things as "political" and then crying to keep "politics" out of things is often used as a weapon for exclusion, for example by sexuality or race, and I think exclusion should be anathema for Linux and open source projects.
I think the general idea is to create as much drain on Russia as possible. Limit there ability to import and export good while creating brain drain and terrible moral.
How many Russians have defected at this point? Spoiler is a decent amount.
How's that working you for y'all there?
oh and spoiler, welcome to the real world opendemocracy.net/en/odr/russi…
Why Russians who fled war are returning to Russia
Ksenia Babich (openDemocracy)Russia literally invaded everyone around them. Look at all the former USSR counties.
The US has been involved in a lot of places but that's not a justification for Russia attacking its neighborhood.
"propaganda"? Oh. You mean like Russia started a full blown unprovoked war with a peaceful nation? That "propaganda"?
Sucks others got caught in the crosshairs, but that's just what happens when your authoritarian government launches unprovoked wars and gets sanctioned.
Poroshenko: "Their children will hole up in the basements - this is how we win the war!" [ENG SUBS]
YouTubeI totally think them invading Ukraine is fucked up too but I also think the Israel situation is messed up too and would you be against someone maintaining code just because they are from Israel?
That would be wrong. Linux is supposed to be about more than political alignments its supposed to be a collaborative effort its always been about that.
This is wrong and its super wrong they don't tell anyone what compliance they are following or who issued it to them which is also supposed to be against what open source is about.