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.
LMFO I was on the reddit thread reading this post and coudn’t believe my eyes reading the comments. We’re living truly revelation times. Like you said this is a long due wakeup call for the rest of the “uncivilized” world.
This is such an odd thing to do… I really cannot see the benefits for the project doing this. Maybe those maintainers were payed for their work and sanctions prohibit paying them or something?
Or maybe some Russian State backed programmers have tried to slip in backdoors in various key systems, numerous times. Including one that almost went live on millions of machines.
Now what the actual fuck
Linus gives it a full green light and refers to negative reactions as Russian bot attacks
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linus-Torvalds-Russian-Devs
Actually insane lol. But you can’t expect much from anybody who willingly takes money from IBM.
I think the Russians that would want to backdoor stuff would just use a name like John.
Hey, Torvalds! 🖕
This is dumb. Corporate divestment, sure, of course, fuck their money and their power structures. But open-source developers are not generally gung-ho about the war effort… let alone propping up their local military-industrial complex.
“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.
Fantastic to hear! wonderful news. Racists and Xenophobes will try to stop global collaboration, but the real conflict that matters will always be the smart vs the lowiq. FOSS is about humanity first and not any particular sub-category. Everyone who gets in the way is trying to divide and stop FOSS from saving the planet.
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.
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. https://github.com/opentofu/registry/pull/824
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.
Open-source is politics.
MKTux
FOSS has always been political. And usually fairly reactionary.
Agree with the former, not the latter.
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.
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.
We had a time of peace everyone was dependent on each other. Now the world is fragmenting and we we’ll probably have war or at least high tension between the parties.
What was this alleged time of peace you speak of?
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?
Oh… USA is untrustworthy country and taints even regular too people by the having to live there. What can they do if CIA/DEA/CIS/DHS/SS/FBI or something g calls and tells them to put in some code they want? Refuse and watched their loved ones rot in prison/get deported/disappear/die? Comply but risk telling the community they just did that?
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.
Yeah, being from Russia is a lot different from being associated with the Russian government. If the maintainers are in the latter, then yeah fuck em, but if they live in Russia with no realistic way of getting out and they’re just trying to live a normal life removed from the bullshit and write code as an intellectual escape? And you take that away from them? Precisely how you radicalize people
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
…and we don’t know whether they’re the former or the latter, no? So maybe a little early to get outraged?
Benefit of the Doubt…
Honestly I wish that was a principle that the internet embraced more. We’re so trigger-happy to be outraged.
Considering the US foreign policy and the impact it has on the world, regardless of whether the white house is R or D, i propose to ban all american devs… preemptively, ya know?
Inexplicably based
I don’t see what this has to do with my comment. I see no indication that all Russians are blanket-banned.
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.
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.
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Just an fyi but blob already stands for binary large object
@BobGnarley @kixik Yep this is definitely not a step forward.
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it’s straight up illegal for the Linux foundation to deal with Russians.
[Citation needed]
As I wrote: sanctions. That’s what compliance means.
I gotta say, that seems likely. Not sanctions in a direct way, but indirectly through funding or other assistance.
Exactly. But mods here are too butthurt to accept that and rather delete my comments, so they can live in their delusions - which was my point
Couldn’t think of a more lemmy thread topic than one involving both Russian geopolitics and linux.
This one is scratching a ton of itch.
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
Hello Internet commenters. Please remember that there’s no rule that says you need to tell us all your gut reaction to this if you know absolutely nothing about the situation.
But then there would be no Internet! /s
knowing nothing about the situation is indeed the problem. if only this process was more transparent…
Being Russian => banned from doing business with the rest of the world
That’s pretty straight forward to me.
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?
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?
Western chauvinism:
the imperial core == the rest of the world
You may not have noticed that most of the world is ignoring the international rules-based order’s sanctions. And not only almost all of the Global South, which represents ~85% of the world’s people and the bulk of the world’s production* and natural resources. Even many Global North countries are skirting their own sanctions to trade with Russia.
The Global North is largely sanctioning itself, and Europe is paying a very high price for it. In particular high energy prices, which is eroding their industrial base even more.
*Since the Global North in its infinite wisdom de-industrialized itself.
The almost the entire world is against Russia. And I don’t see China coming to Russia’s aid any time soon.
When you think the entire world is just western countries. 🤡
@possiblylinux127 @davel Since 2022, China has amplified its purchase of cheaper Russian oil after the West hit Moscow with unprecedented sanctions.
Of course, money
Money and violence, the twin forces that make the world go 'round.
You’re just making it worse 😂 You really have no idea what’s going on in the real world outside of the imperial core, and you’re really sure you do.
You can look up the UN vote. 141 counties voted for the movement to have Russia withdraw from Ukraine. 5 were against it and 35 abstained.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_General_Assembly_Resolution_ES-11/1
The UN is a toothless joke, always has been.
Sure, but that vote hasn’t actually done anything, and countries continue to trade with Russia. And the Global South countries haven’t curtailed their relations with Russia one whit. In fact some are building even deeper ties with Russia. They’re building an alternative system to SWIFT, they’re trading in each others’ currencies to avoid the dollar, and they’re making plans for some kind of BANCOR-like currency. The BRICS summit is happening right now, hosted by Russia.
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.
I’m definitely all for Ukraine winning, but this is bullshit, basically the red scare all over again (but for tech).
red scare all over again
It never stopped. Most people still think Russia’s communist. Or any country that calls themselves as such.
Sure but they are not a democracy.
Nope, they’re an oligarchy, pretty much like the US.
Neither is Canada. It’s full of occupying settlers, for example.
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.
Wasn’t that XZ Utils backdoor recently with state ties or am I just remembering wrong
No one knows yet. Given the scale of the operation it’s most likely a large organization.
They very well could. However, it also could come from some US intelligence agency as well.
I am quite disappointed at the lack of transparency regarding this.
