friendica.eskimo.com
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.
and what do random developers have to do with a war between oligarchies? are we banning the dirty us imperialists next, because they do more damage than russia ever will?
or are we finding a negative thing about every nationality and ban international opensource collaboration entirely?
or, and hear me out on this one, the individual programmers making linux and 90% of the internet happen might not be fascists regardless of what shitty government reingns their lives?
i do, (contemporary, us) sanctions are a way to punish entire countries for daring not to adopt neoliberalism.
i wonder how cuba would be doing right now if not for it.
You're sounding like a certain mustache man right now. Sure, boycott states and governments, but not the people. They could just be regular Russians who just want to code to escape the bullshit that their government is spewing on TV every day. Never blame people for their governments.
Would you be fine being blacklisted from kernel development just because of the crime of simply being your nationality?
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.
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
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
@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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
How to piss off people 101.
Do you fail to remember how the tech world collectively cringe at one guy who intentionally injected malware into his own npm library to delete all data from Russia and Belarus?
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.
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.
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.
red scare all over again
It never stopped. Most people still think Russia's communist. Or any country that calls themselves as such.
How's that working you for y'all there?
oh and spoiler, welcome to the real world opendemocracy.net/en/odr/russi…
No work, no money, no right to stay, nostalgia – the reasons for returning are many, but life back home isn’t easyKsenia Babich (openDemocracy)
Petro Poroshenko announced another cynical approach of the Ukrainian government to the recalcitrant residents of Donbass during his speech in Odessa.YouTube
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.
As far as I can read from that, they're still maintainers, just have had their credit removed from the contributors page, no?
Still a strange thing to do and I look forwards to an explanation.
I'm pretty talkative on certain subjects when I see people mangling the discussion and engaging in bad faith.
This is just softpedaling it and telling people to suspect foul play just because they are Russian honestly. There are some significant sanctions going up against Israeli companies but nobody seems concerned with that.
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.
Yeah, being from Russia is a lot different from being associated with the Russian government.
Lies! You're a communist! Russian troll!
/s for the obtuse
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.
I 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.
My first thought is that this was to make Linux palatable to western regulations, like how companies can't use Kaspersky anymore. Stupid if I'm right because it's not like the fsb is going to sneak spyware into Linux.
Edit: Linus commented on this and I was right: lemmy.world/comment/13034386
it's a pity that politics is penetrating more and more into open source and FOSS.
recently support for Russian cloud providers was cut out of opentofu. github.com/opentofu/registry/p…
now this. this is, of course, natural the core and many components of modern distributions have not been free in terms of decision-making for a long time and are under the influence of large companies, which in turn are under the influence of the USA.
Explanation Yesterday, pull request #817 was successfully approved and merged into the main branch. As part of this pull request, all providers affiliated with or based in Russia were removed from ...GitHub
It's a fact of life that politics permeates everything, nothing is in isolation of the political climate it exists within.
The state of the world today is a function of the politics that got us here, a big change in world politics can have dramatic and far reaching effects.
A healthy global FOSS culture requires collaborative politics to be the flavour of the day—which is unfortunately not the case in a lot of countries currently.
A healthy global FOSS culture requires collaborative politics to be the flavour of the day
Bullshit. There's no reason people with political differences can't collaborate on the same project, unless those differences are really huge.
Politics is not just the relationship between two people, it's the relationship between a person and everyone/everything else in the world.
Reducto ad absurdum: would you suggest a world where every country is at war with everyone else would foster a better environment for global FOSS collaboration than one where the world was at complete peace?
I honestly thought the statement you quoted was entirely uncontroversial. "Healthy" and "global" being the key words, I'm not saying it's a requirement for FOSS to exist in general or anything.
See: the FOSS higs that all flipped out when contributor agreements with codes of conduct like "don't be homophobic or racist" started popping up.
It was quite a struggle and there is still a large old guard that simply refuses to move on it.
russia is untrustworthy country and taints even regular good people by them having to live there. What can they do if kgb or something calls and tells them to put in some code they want? Refuse and watch their loved ones die? Comply but risk telling the community they just did that?
edit. ok maybe that was a bit too harshly put. But dont you think at all that there is possibility that kremlin would exploit something like that?
Does Russia invading Ukraine justify the US invading Iraq?
Though we are discussing individuals here, should we ban Americans in projects to maintain moral integrity?
BTW are you referring to historical (pre 1990) expansion as well? Because an American really shouldn't want to go there.
"Compliance requirements"? The kernel's american now?! WTF?
The commonality of all these maintainers being dropped? They appear to all be Russian or associated with Russia. Most of them with .ru email addresses.
Not short-sighted in the least...
Similarly, the driver code remains within the kernel -- including for Russian hardware such as around the Baikal CPUs from Russia's Baikal Electronics.
Not a hypocrite move at all...
Are israeli developers blocked as well? How about all american developers considering how the US foreign policy keeps fucking everyone up all over the place in the name of liberty and freedom... of oil?
The kernel's american now?! WTF?
Now we see the intended outcome of the "Inclusively" movement of the past few years.
I can't wait to see this "Inclusively" extended to China, India, Brazil and others.
We'll truly be the most Inclusive ever!!! What a great thing!!!!!!!!!!
The open source / FOSS movement in China is pretty rad. I use a sweet all platform text editor maintained by Chinese devs only.
People should be more wary of the control universities, NGOs, finance through those, law enforcement infiltration etc from US, Euros, Japan, South Korea, Aus has over open source projects due to technology being such a high national security priority.
Guess we're just going to be racist and run with the misdirection of criticism of US laws on to foreign enemies. Just go with the flow, I guess.
If they really want reverse brain drain it isn't my problem, it's their long term problem. CERN is also making a dumb mistake, all universities are in on this, it's imperial chauvinism.
I think at the moment FOSS movement has a core of libertarian idealism which historically cleaves to the west when anything is on the line. This is because of academic institutions being dependent on/greedy for financial and political backing, and the control of the time economy of workers by tech corps trying to turn open source into "mow my lawn for free, build character" or by the media platforms which popularizers/online tutors of open source tech and software and operating systems are dependent on
However it is also a worker's movement in some ways not just a device user's movement, and I think it will play an important part in the battle over Wall St's tech cash cow globally.
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?
I wouldn't be surprised if they did something similar for China at some point. (If tensions worsen)
I don't see them doing anything outside of that
“Compliance requirements”? The kernel’s american now?! WTF?
Nope, but it is not above the law.
I suppose any law in any jurisdiction you want to use it, don't you think ?
Guys, are you all really that young to not remember alla the fuss with crypto software ? Same thing here: you want to distrubute something in a country, you need to follow the country's law, even if they are stupid.
How we can reign that back in, I don’t know.
They're above the law, so... guillotines.
This is the only plan the west has to win the war. Keep fucking over random Russians in the hopes Putin somehow becomes politically vulnerable over this, despite opposition getting weaker than ever throughoit the war and with the onset of sanctions. Now we are asking random Linux contributors, please come back when you've overthrown your government for us.
Russia is of course the only country that has ever invaded another country so it's only fair.
No matter how many vulnerabilities are introduced into software by western allied intelligence agencies, we should never be held accountable for dealing with them ourselves. After all Russians are uniquely responsible for their tyrannical government because of their Asiatic brainpans.
Also, wonder what happened in 2014 that might've provoked a response from Russia there.
Ukraine using its right to free association, to sign an agreement with the EU strengthening relations? Specifically including a further formalising of cooperation around Chernobyl (Euratom is independently a signatory), an issue entirely caused by Russia in the first place, who didn't ever offer a similar level of cooperation? Is that what you're referring too?
Now what the actual fuck
Linus gives it a full green light and refers to negative reactions as Russian bot attacks
phoronix.com/news/Linus-Torval…
Following yesterday's news first featured on Phoronix of several Linux driver maintainers being de-listed from their maintainer positions within the mainline Linux kernel over their connections to Russia, Linus Torvalds has today commented on the mat…www.phoronix.com
He's Finnish by heart even though he lives in the US. I think it is probably a pretty big worry for him that Russia might invade Finland.
I doubt this is something that he would initiate but if there was any pressure from other parties (I'm sure there was) I don't think he is going to fight it.
I understand that.
But he also sits at the heart of the open-source community, and his actions might ripple through the entire sector. With this much influence, allowing your personal fears to chime in is unacceptable.
Once we start fragmenting open-source the way we fragment everything else, we lose the very spirit of it and open doors to so much potential power abuse.
Besides, I really don't see how restricting Russian maintainers would prevent Russian military aggression. If something important there is powered by Linux, it can be forked and modified to serve a specific need. Not to mention Finland is now part of NATO.
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
socially he’s not terrible but when the war drums come beating he’s stepping in line for the stars and stripes
Like pretty much every Finn would these days, really.
Even Wikipedia, which is a shockingly bloodthirsty pro-NATO outlet, admits there is zero proof that a "Russian state actor" did this, there are just "western security experts" claiming it (as usual), and opinion is divided.
Did you even read this or do you just vaguely remember a Wired article? I have been able to see through these obvious ploys since I was a teenager reading about cold war propaganda (okay that was like 5 years ago but still SMDH)
Great sign for discussion that hacking is still being treated by Redditors as Russian, Chinese, and North Korean until proven otherwise. 🤕
The funny thing is Stuxnet is a good example of how sanctions can backfire. We used a supply chain attack and the Iranians hardened their systems. Can anyone really claim it was any different than another Mossad "humiliate them and hope something happens" operation that ultimately blew the cover off years of intelligence work?
The Lebanon pagers attack, Russian sanctions and CERN or Linux creating reverse brain drain will continue to backfire, on our ability to even twist these screws, also on our supply chains in countries which consider themselves a US target or even just a middleman.
Even Wikipedia, which is a shockingly bloodthirsty pro-NATO outlet, admits there is zero proof that a “Russian state actor” did this, there are just “western security experts” claiming it (as usual), and opinion is divided.
Well, I don't think that a "[insert your preferred state] state actor" would ever coming out saying "yes, we tried to to it".
Not to say that what Wikipedia say is false but on the other hand I am not sure how to check if it is true, in these cases.
It's literally just speculation.
I agree.
Even if it were true, what the fuck does that have to do with the nationality of a few Linux contributors?
Probably nothing, I agree. But since there are sanctions against Russia I suppose they have not really any other choice.
Is that sad ? Yes, but it is life.
While this is completely appalling, I cannot say I am shocked considering what Linus posts on some platforms and in some conversations. Really not surprising.
Don't take this justification seriously for a second. This is the check coming due for a community with leadership still beholden to western political hegemony, the intellectual appratus that decides who gets educated and what is published, etc etc. Getting a bit offtopic. View this in the same context as CERN kicking out Russians. Mask is coming off of science, democracy, freedom of speech and all that nonsense made up to spruce up the myth of civilization versus barbarity.
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.
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.
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.
Oh yeah I skipped over the Nazi instances because they are pretty isolated. 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.
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
There is nothing stopping you from moving on
This guy was just telling me he couldn't stand to see opinions that don't mindlessly support sabotaging the Linux community. Now he says I should just move on? Weird.
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.
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.
Linus Torvalds Confirms Decision to Remove Maintainers from Russia
You couldn't come up with a more powerful spit in the direction of FOSS. And from Linus, who is now kind of showing f*ck to the entire community. Here you have freedom, openness and all that. Today they just wiped their ass with it, and by one of the founders.
This is the moment when the split politics, dirty ones from all sides, have penetrated into the very heart of OpenSource - into the Linux kernel.
Software still has to follow legal rules, like when some distros removed stuff to be ITAR /EAR compliant for shipping across borders
Nothing is stopping Russia from taking the Open Source
kernel and developing it themselves
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.
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
Unfortunately, Russia would not hesitate a second to use these Russian maintainers to include some shady stuff into Linux. Russia used everything they can to their advantage.
Now, we can wait for that to happen and have all sorts of issues when some backdoor gets distributed on a massive scale on a lot of Linux systems, or we can be realistic about the situation and take action before that.
I would not trust anyone from China to work in FOSS either, since they are exactly the same.
I do agree that quality control should catch things, but we are all human and we don't catch a 100%. So if quality control is flooded with too much things to catch, the chance of one slipping by increases.
Also, a lot of FOSS is based on volenteers, do we just ask those people to put in more hours? Who is responsible anyways if something makes it through and actually causes damage to something or someone?
I find the decision quite reasonable. You at least filter out the party most likely to pull something shady. We should still be very careful, but it takes away some the work.
If we follow through with it, I would absolutely never ever trust anyone from the US, for example. US is very much known for cyber espionage and shady operations, and could absolutely backdoor Linux.
This is all power play, and it comes from a very certain direction amidst this political struggle.
You want your open source code not to have backdoors? Review it meticulously. This is really the only way, and the one an entire open-source community relies on - pretty successfully, by the way.
The US is in many ways, as bad as Russia concerning privacy. If the Americans want a backdoor, they'll get it too.
However, not many western countries are currently almost at war with the US, the US so far has been a very good ally to the Western countries. It is not in their interest to bring our hospitals down, or put a stop to our air traffic. They don't gain much from hurting us. Russia does.
Russia does have an interest in bringing systems down and spying as much as possible. And they have no ethic restrictions at all.
So why should we leave an obvious angle of attack open? Sure, it's supposedly to be found by code reviews, but why make their job harder?
Do we even have numbers on how many Russians have contributed?
We stop at that point. Because it is very clear and obvious to everybody, that a Russian citizen can be forced to do the governments bidding at any time and Russia has demonstrated that they will do that. The whole country is build on propaganda and fear amongst it's people.
The rest of the groups you name, are not the same. Sure, a poor person could be bribed. But is that the same as the 100% chance that Russia will use anything they can to fuck with everybody they see as an enemy? I don't think so.
So your arguments are simply invalid in this case. If Russia was a democracy, a real one, I would say they made the wrong decision by pushing the Russians out. But in the current circumstances? I understand the decision.
Uhh ~~sir~~ Linus, this is a ~~Wendy's~~ Linux kernel.
.
Why force your political beliefs on something that has nothing to do with?
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.
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...
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.
"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.
You know that Russia wasn't able to compete in the Olympics or Paralympics this year, right? The individual athletes weren't banned however, but they had to compete under a neutral banner and weren't in the parade of nations.
Edit: I should have added, was disgusted because Israel were allowed to compete. Huge double standard there.