I think the Russians that would want to backdoor stuff would just use a name like John.
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!!!
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.
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?
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.
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.
Just an fyi but blob already stands for binary large object
@BobGnarley @kixik Yep this is definitely not a step forward.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
Gotta have them “various compliance requirements”, man, gotta have’em. Don’t ask me what they are, but damnit, gotta have’em.
This is a shame, I always thought Linux was supposed to be an International collaboration, hate to see it caught up in this bullshit political agenda.
No it was code started by Linus that got huge.
I agree to this. I was literally just in the shower thinking how Linux, the space station, and the Olympics are the only times we as humans come together to collaborate
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.
Banning CFCs went pretty well too
@JWBananas @secret300 Yea you know the funny thing about that, CFC’s are heavy and tend to sink to the ground if not propelled into the stratosphere by rockets, say like the old Space Shuttle with it’s solid chlorine oxidizer boosters, or the various military missiles which mostly have been converted to liquid hydrogen and oxygen engines. But nah we got to spend $3k to replace our A/C because it contains CFC’s that never would have made it up into the atmosphere anyway because of you know, physics, little things like gravity, so the military can avoid blame.
If that was how it worked then we would have all suffocated long ago under all the argon that sank to the bottom of the troposphere. The atmosphere is turbulent and extremely good at mixing gases of varying densities, and CFCs last decades before being decomposed or removed from the air.
@secret300 The project to discover elements 119 and 120 which previously were a US/Russia collaboration also put on hold. All of humanity moves backwards when we fight, nothing is gained.
Political agenda is a funny euphemism for imperialist invasion and genocide.
Gee i’m glad israeli maintainers are being blocked as well.
I’m all for sanctioning them too. Economic sanctions are the bare minimum we should be doing to genocidal authoritarians.
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.
@Midnight If Russia were the only one involved, and if weren’t provoked by outside powers like say, oh, the United States, yea I could agree with you but my knowledge of history precludes my accepting that explanation.
Putin is a despot trying to make his mark on history. No amount of appeasement from the global West would have stopped him from ordering the invasion.
deleted by creator
🥱
Does invading your neighbor count as international collaboration? Not that all Russian people can be held directly responsible for the actions of their government.
Ehh they keep saying we are not involved we are not whatever. You can only say that so long. I mean the soldiers are coming from somewhere these are not people grown in vats.
It’s a little unclear what you mean, like because more than half a million Russian soldiers have already been killed so far and yet the war keeps going, that the people must be responsible for supporting?
Russia is conscripting, so most are not there by choice but required by law. If you draft dodge and get caught, you go to prison, and still just end up on the frontline anyway, since they are emptying their prisons to use as soldiers, too. And these people will be shot and killed by their own side if they attempt a retreat, while fed propaganda and misinformation about their treatment if they surrender. There has been significant human trafficking to support their war effort. They’ve also depended heavily on mercenary forces outside of their military in order to have skilled soldiers, and are now even receiving soldiers from North Korea in order to continue fighting.
Besides that, there are so many factors that go into why a person would decide to join the military and in reality, they are usually economic ones or from extensive propaganda.
Aside from the fact that it’s pretty insane to suggest to kick someone off a project for no reason other than their nationality (the article doesn’t say any of these maintainers supported the invasion or had any ties with the government), even if these people actively supported the government, as far as kernel development is concerned… I don’t really care? If their contributions are good then I want their patches to be merged. Tor was made by the US government, which I in no way condone, but I still use Tor.
@theunknownmuncher The US has been involved in probably 300 regime changes throughout the world, has invaded many countries, including those that we were not affiliated with. Russia invades a neighboring country when we install a leader that is going to allow us to put missiles on their border. I really hate to see political hegemony get in the way of a good collaborative effort, we all suffer for it if we allow this.
The US has been involved in probably 300 regime changes throughout the world, has invaded many countries, including those that we were not affiliated with.
Absolutely fair point. I agree with you on this portion of your comment.
@theunknownmuncher And I could give countless other examples of other countries. I don’t agree with the war, but I also know if we hadn’t installed Zelenskyy and if the United States had honored our promise to Russia not to extend NATO past East Germany, then it would not have happened. So I understand that it is hardly one sided on Russias part. If we didn’t fund Ukraine, if we didn’t offer them membership in NATO, none of this would have happened. And I’ll add if the Ukraine and Russia did not have large oil reserves and some other precious minerals, the United States would be a lot less interested in them. But that’s all in the past. Now, you and I can disagree with each other and we can disagree with what our governments do, but if we want to build a better world it has to happen through the cooperative efforts of citizens NOT governments because the latter just historically a lot less likely to happen. So I can’t see this move as at all productive towards ending this particular war or world peace in general, I see it as quite the opposite.
So why did Russiactaje Crimera? Saying this wouldn’t have happened is BS. Russia I expected a quick and decisive victory.
Wait, what?? Zelenskyy took office after being democratically elected in 2019. Russia invaded Ukraine and annexed the Crimea region of Ukraine in 2014. Your timeline does not check out there.
Its almost as if it is coming right out of the Russian media
@possiblylinux127 @theunknownmuncher I know it might hurt your brain but it is helpful to fully understand an issue to understand the other sides perspectives.
@theunknownmuncher Your timeline doesn’t go back far enough and I notice you completely ignored the bit about Eastern expansion of NATO and what the United States promised Russia.
Your justification of genocide is both ludicrous and gross.
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
if russians get banned from the kernel bc russia invaded ukraine
You should read the article because this is not a thing that has occurred, at least not yet.
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
@bunitor I’d agree, but on this same basis with all the conflicts in the world you’d have to expand this to about 99% of the globe.
YUP
so… maybe nobody should be banned and it sucks that this happened?
@bunitor That would be my take. My take is that as individuals we are were international cooperation needs to begin, it isn’t going to happen with our governments, at least it never has historically.
We had international cooperation but the world is splintering now. Might be some security concerns but also think some of it is America protecting its companies from China companies.
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.
100% agree with you! Like I said, I don’t think we can hold all Russian people directly responsible for the actions of their government.
I wish for an ideal world where politics could stay out of Linux, but this is extremely tricky and cannot be treated black and white. Labeling things as “political” and then crying to keep “politics” out of things is often used as a weapon for exclusion, for example by sexuality or race, and I think exclusion should be anathema for Linux and open source projects.
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.
@lily33 @theunknownmuncher The best way we can help Ukraine is by removing outside influences from both sides. What is being portrayed as a war in Ukraine is really a proxy war between Russia and the US that was egged on by the US. This is most unwise given that both nations are armed to the teeth with nukes. We really should be looking at ways to de-escalate not escalate this war.
De-escalation is easy: Russia can get the fuck out of Ukraine. All of it.
@remotelove Yea sure, let the US place missiles on their border. Not a rational option.
Well considering the US said they would defend Ukraine from Russia when Ukraine got rid of there nukes. Yah kind of hand tied with Russia invading.
“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.
Greg sent out the patch but won’t respond to mail list questions. Sad to see Linux leadership bend the knee
honestly, i’m not even sure i’d blame him. who knows what kind of pressure he’s getting behind closed doors
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.
Good
But Torvalds is from Soviet Finland [SF]
Spent too much time in .ml I see
