Yeah, it’s kinda unclear, English is not my first language.

The reality is that there are many other wars around the world, yet the Russians are the only ones getting sanctioned. They should set an example by sanctioning everyone that currently works for a company that enables any military. Maybe then the world will see how stupid this whole thing is.

Even if that is the case, that doesn’t mean that their code or the code they approve is garbage. I don’t care who you are or who you work for. What you do in your life outside of open source is your own business. Quality of code is what matters in open source.

They do have troll factories there to influence public opinion.

In the Linux kernel? No. Definitely not. Maybe you’d like to see what happened after they got removed from the maintainers list, it was spam and trolling, and that is not OK in any scenario.

The problem is this still leads to questions about transparency about the project in general and how this decision was made and whether it was made by those involved in the project or was an order from the US government.

My personal belief is that it was an advice by the lawyers and they went with it balls in because who would care about a few Russian maintainers, right 😒. Linus probably probably put GHK to it, as to not be him that does the PR, split the heat that may come their way, which it did.

I coldheartedly believe that Linus meant what he said since there was no apology afterwards. Russians are bad in general and they all think the same, they support Puttin.

They have been stripped of a role because of a thing that has nothing to do with their competence to contribute to the project. Quality of code is all that matters in open source, not who you are or who you work for.

Sums up my feelings perfectly.

Mine as well.

Not that invested that much, but I seriously, I thought Linus was better than this… I wouldn’t expect this even from Stalman to be honest, this is new level of low if you ask me.

What kind of a hellish timeline is this?

I have no idea… if everything is dictated by corps and governments (at least ones that we can’t trust with simple things, such as healthcare), I really have really lost all faith in humanity as a whole… not because they’re less human individually, but because no one sees anything wrong with this, in general…

Sorry, but the US is almost certainly the main culprit here. They’re loosing power in every aspect and they want to reinstate that power in every way possible. As any human being, letting go of a position of power is hard. They just can’t accept the fact that someone could be better than them in capitalism then them, which the Chinese proved they can.

It served them well when they were 1st, but it’s no good when someone else does it.

Let’s say that this company pays the best $$$ and that you really need money for… whatever… now, let’s reverse the roles and this person is working for a company that has contracts with the US military during the time of the invasion of Iraq.

See my point… there would have been nothing wrong with that, but all of sudden, it’s a problem if Russians do it 🤨…

Political as in freedom to contribute, not political as in “we’re banning devs because they work for someone we don’t like”.

Not everywhere. I seriously doubt Cuba has sanctions against anyone.

That’s shared source, look it up, it has nothing to do with open source.

What? Almost none of the tech where I live is from the US. Not to mention that Samsung is the biggest contender to Apple in the US and they’re more or less 50/50 with market share ATM.

The US is losing the war on world domination, something they were winning the past century or so, and they don’t like that. That’s basically the only reason any of this is happening. The war is just an excuse. As always, they would rather have Russia and China out of the picture than having to compete with them… because they can’t, especially not with China.

Like how my preference is Protonmail being hosted by a neutral country based company

I also use Protonmail because of this. Sure, the free plan is not really great, but I only keep important stuff, so I don’t get over the 500MB limit, I delete or archive the rest.

kernel…however any novel encryption does have to be noted to NSA and other organizarions in the USA

That may be true, but only if you’re a US citizen. For example, my country doesn’t have such regulations. In the end, if it’s open source, it shouldn’t matter whether I report stuff like that to any organization. It’s open source, look it up, it’s on a git repo online freely for everyone to review the code.

A foreign state actor wanting to send encrypted communications to overthrow another entity isn’t going to follow software laws anyway.

Exactly. As if hacking and DDOSing are legal 😒. It’s just throwing money away on some people doing pointless things.

On the other hand, having a ln encryption technologies taskforce makes sense IMO. Watching over what’s going on in the open source world regarding cryptography, yeah, that is something that can actually be useful… for the country’s cyber-security I mean.

I wasn’t saying that Russia is not an ass, I was just saying that the whole point of open source is that it’s above borders and nationalities, religion, sexual orientation, etc. It should be an imperative to keep these core values, not bend over backwards when even no warning has been issued, which I’m fairly certain it would have never happened. And on top of that, Linus’es reaction to them being Russian, I mean… come on!

But moving people around to code isn’t 🤨? I’m sure it far easier to justify a donation than to book plane tickets and find places for the devs where to stay. And to be perfectly honest, the whole point of open source is “you can contribute from anywhere”. The first time I would’ve encountered the move people around problem, I would have been “this is not the point of open source, it goes against the very spirit of it, we have to do something about this”.

US and EU double standards is what this whataboutism is all about. I can state this for a fact, since my country is also in this pickle because of EU double standards. And it is constructive if you have a valid reason to raise the issue. There is a valid reason to raise this issue.

I still don’t think something so important should be beholden to the whims of one company (Linux Foundation) or their country’s laws (USA).

Exactly my thoughts.

I would strongly prefer to use an operating system that didn’t have this problem. Do any even exist?

I was contemplating using FreeBSD, but then I found about the kernel switch to forbid Russian or Chinese usernames and… well, that’s not an option as well IMO.

Unfortunately, we would never know.

Here’s an idea: don’t invade sovereign nations unprovoked.

That is a great idea! Unfortunately, not everyone has a say in that, especially mere mortals… you know, people like devs.

Unfortunately there wasn’t really any international authority that could do it

There is, the UN, but they silent, as always… at least regarding the US. We all know why…

This thread is full of software engineers with just no concept of how society functions, or even a basic understanding of the geopolitical context of any of this.

The whole idea of open source is that you can contribute without restrictions and regardless where you live.