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.
There has to be a way to fit Star Trek in too…
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
Yes there are, I think you guys should block .ML and enjoy your botted shithole website. Better your feed be an obvious echo chamber full of hate.
you’re preaching to the choir here; my fault for not including the sarcasm/snark tag.
Lmao sarcasm is indistinguishable from the full on brigading from the “help tankies are brigading us” instances going on in here to me 😅
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.
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.
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.
Removed by mod
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?
Take it up with the concept of sanctions.
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.
WaR bEtWeEn oLiGaRcHiEs
Here grandpa you forgot your pills
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.
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
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.
The UN is a toothless joke, always has been.
When you think the entire world is just western countries. 🤡
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.
But then there would be no Internet! /s
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.
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.
International economic sanctions? He said that.
They were getting paid to develop the Linux kernel? No? Then what’s actually the requirement?
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.
Removed by mod
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
You need that reddit.world or shitty.twerks URL to really sell the bit and make the tone indicator necessary IMHO
…and we don’t know whether they’re the former or the latter, no? So maybe a little early to get 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.
You are casually declaring all Russians should be assumed to be state agents until proven otherwise, and therefore the negative reaction to this obvious betrayal of principles, not even for convenience but for hatred, is unjustified.
I am literally saying the opposite: I am saying that it’s not clear that this applies to all Russians, or just ones that are sanctioned.
Benefit of the Doubt…
Honestly I wish that was a principle that the internet embraced more. We’re so trigger-happy to be outraged.
No the contributors should not be considered guilty until proven innocent just to give Linus et al the benefit of the doubt fuckface!
Oh geez, this the third reply by the same account… Again, I’m just saying that we don’t know whether the contributors were assumed guilty, or if they have actual ties to sanctioned companies.
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.
Would you say that Linux contributors with ties to MIT and other US universities that get funding from the same organizations of the MIC and intelligence racket are suspect? No? Yeah just Russians. Cold War propaganda chugging little twerp
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.
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.
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.
I think getting all worked up about it is probably the first step to getting more information out of them. ┻━┻︵ (°□°)/ ︵ ┻━┻
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.
Removed by mod
Just an fyi but blob already stands for binary large object
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.
Removed by mod
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
Kernel development is for
only.This is poetry
I am quite disappointed at the lack of transparency regarding this.
“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?
You do realize that the Linux foundation is an American based entity right? It isn’t a shock that it is bound by US law.
They employ Torvalds, Torvalds owns Linux™. Who owns the code?
“Compliance requirements”? The kernel’s american now?! WTF?
Nope, but it is not above the law.
Which law under which jurisdiction?
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.
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 wanna skirt by all the political stuff and ask what that text editor is?
Nope I’m keeping it
Gaslight gatekeep girlboss
Well this is the last thread where I want to open up possibilities of text editor drama, but it is Siyuan
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.
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
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.
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.
Well for what its worth there are other counties outside of Russia
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.
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.
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.
Open-source is politics.
MKTux
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?
40,000 years ago
To be honest, the only reason why any of that appeared to be true, or the west appeared to uphold free speech, just like free trade policies and laissez faire approach to international finance, that was all just because Wall St did not feel threatened, that was all just because the propaganda was received unthinkingly for the past 30 years or so. Especially between 2001 and the first part of the financial crash.
Removed by mod
Oh… USA is untrustworthy country and taints even regular good people by them having to live there. What can they do if CIA/DEA/CIS/DHS/SS/FBI or something calls and tells them to put in some code they want? Refuse and watch their loved ones rot in prison/get deported/disappear/die? Comply but risk telling the community they just did that?
Finland is an untrustworthy country. America is an untrustworthy country. You want special ttreatment for citizens of the NATO bloc despite constantly running intel operations and huge invasions since WWII and especially the 90s, thag got worse after they successfully desposed the former USSR and turned it into the capitalist shithole of the Russian Federation - which tried damn hard to ally with NATO before we pushed them away. No, it’s not “harshly put”, you have antique, vicious neoconservative politics and racist bullshit to back it up.
I think the Russians that would want to backdoor stuff would just use a name like John.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/linux-fellow-bans-university-contributing-kernel Or just suggest they back door the kernel to an American university
Error 500 can’t upload the image but check these names for ideas on your next Russian puppet account:
https://imgur.com/gallery/even-more-american-names-from-that-japanese-baseball-game-6HAtN
Edit…I wasn’t calling HIM a Russian troll. I was suggesting to use these names the next time AnYONE makes a Russian puppet account. Sorry, language.
Mine?
Removed by mod
No I’m getting error 500 when trying to upload a photo. So I linked an imgur of what I was trying to to reference. It’s from a Japanese baseball game they marketed in America.
Gotta have them “various compliance requirements”, man, gotta have’em. Don’t ask me what they are, but damnit, gotta have’em.
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.
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
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.
I know you are saying this is a bad thing but as an American I have no issues with it.
That’s racist.
American national can take many forms. The kind the person is probably the kind based in American idealism (think superman, Captain America, “liberty and justice for all”) and less the kind based in racism.
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.
Actually insane lol. But you can’t expect much from anybody who willingly takes money from IBM.
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.
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.
Removed by mod
Fact is you know I am right, you just don’t have any principles. You seem baffled some people uphold principles.
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.
Yep, anyone who is celebrating this is shortsighted and letting their own nationalistic ideas and jingoism cloud their judgement.
There is a hot war going on and the US is using sanctions to isolate Russia from using western technology to continue their genocide. That goes a little beyond “nationalistic ideas”. Russia is being isolated for their actions and this was past due. It sucks for the Russian maintainers, but under the heading of “war is hell” this is a minor inconvenience.
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 https://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.
Who owns the copyright is irrelevant. Russian developers are still entirely entitled to use and modify the Linux source. The only thing they can’t do is submit their changes for inclusion in the main Linux development tree. The only real consequence for them is that their changes might be broken by future kernel updates and they will have to fix it themselves to use newer kernels. That, and they will have to maintain their own distribution system. I’ve also seen nothing to suggest anyone’s code is being removed.
The US didn’t invade Ukraine and, obviously, isn’t under US or European sanctions. I’m sure that you and I could agree on a great deal when it comes to American foreign policy, it’s just not relevant to this situation where Russia is the clear aggressor. (Setting aside the usual “buffer zone” bullshit that every aggressor state uses and Putin already abandoned).
Who owns the copyright is irrelevant.
It is, which is why i focused on where the repository is located and whether that determines possession.
Possession is irrelevant too. Access to source code has not being restricted, and doing so wouldn’t even be realistically possible. The only practical change is that new updates from these developers will not be published by the Linux Foundation, and ongoing integration will not be done by mainline Linux developers.
If Russia wants, they can fork Linux at any time, call it Rusinux, and do whatever they want with it. They could even port future Linux updates back to their kernel. They still have to keep it under the GPL2 license, but only if they want to honor Western copyright laws and treaties.
How exactly is he turning his back on the GPL? Those Russian maintainers are still free to fork the kernel, make whatever changes they want, and release it. The GPL has never guaranteed that a maintainer has to take contributions from anyone. Open source could never function that way.
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: https://lemmy.world/comment/13034386
They very well could. However, it also could come from some US intelligence agency as well.
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.
Possibly, but that’s a much smaller project being run by 1 guy. Linux has a lot more people and reviews involved.
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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_YozYt8l-g
Removed by mod
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.
the foundation should have moved long ago but I think Linus’ personal adoration of the US is going to get in the way of that.
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
That is interesting, my comment got removed.
Uhh
sirLinus, this is aWendy’sLinux kernel..
Why force your political beliefs on something that has nothing to do with?
Not sure if being against Russian aggression can be called a “political belief” as nearly all Finns pretty much agree on it.
Removed by mod
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.
Removed by mod
by this logic it turns out that the code quality control system is built in such a way that if someone has malicious intent and wants to add malicious code, but is not affiliated with dubious structures, then he will easily succeed? Hey, what about enough eyeballs and shallow bugs?
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.
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*
Removed by mod
If only there was some sort of review process for code to get into the kernel…
