For me as an old fart this all sounds like such a stupid thing… who cares if someone who volunteer to work for an software project is a Russian, German, Iranian or - God forbid - an Frenchman. My personal - and of course completely insignificant - opinion is that politics should stay out.
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.
“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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Actually insane lol. But you can’t expect much from anybody who willingly takes money from IBM.
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
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?
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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.
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
@possiblylinux127 @TheOubliette Four years ago was certainly more peaceful than today.
I might frame it as less embroiled in open war and extermination.
@TheOubliette i don’t think there is any way you can measure and/or frame it that my statement is not true.
To split hairs, saying “more peaceful” implies it was peaceful in the first place and even is now, just less so. I don’t think it was peaceful at either point. Which why I am framing it as a status quo of violence that was lesser 4 years ago and greater now.
It depends on how you measure it. That was the start of covid so people were dying
@possiblylinux127 Whether you measure it by the sheer number of conflicts, their average size, or the number of people dying as a result.
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.
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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.
@reksas @fireshell There is no such thing as a trust worthy country because they’re all run by politicians and there is no such thing as a trust worthy politician. There is an old saying, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
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.
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Fact is you know I am right, you just don’t have any principles. You seem baffled some people uphold principles.
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?
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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.
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Actually I’m interested how it looks legally ( it somebody cares about it at all ). Whether the Russian contributors could ask to revert their changes as they most likely never signed the contract to transfer their code copyrights. For sure it will have a big impact on foss because if you have at least one American and Russian contributors, you may get in the biggest shitshow. Additionally if I was considering now to become a contributors, I’d be wondering if it’s worthy at all to work for free and then to be banned no thanks for whole free work years
Hey, Torvalds! 🖕
he makes me want to switch to bsd
is bsd safe from this? where is their foundation based?
