Also from seemingly reasonable commenters there are many arguments around security coming up. I don’t get how one can jump to that idea? This obviously has nothing to do with security, it’s about sanction compliance. And yes, likely a pretty pointless sanction compliance in this instance, as the sanctioned entities don’t have a direct benefit from having an employee name mentioned in the kernel. However that’s not how sanctions work, both just because, and also intuitively it makes sense: Sanctions wouldn’t be enforcable at scale if every single case would have to be judged on merit - it’s hard enough to enforce them as is.
And btw I so hope most of the comments on here are Russian trolls, but I fear many are people that fully drunk the Russian trolls’ cool-aid and are now fully brainwashed…
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.
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
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 was wondering what’s up with the comments but then I realized the main feed sent me to .ml.
Comments do drastically differ between .ml and .world. On .ml, you’ll see more sympathy towards Russia and China.
But the issue on hand is way bigger than that. It’s importance is not in Russia getting sanctioned somewhere else - it’s in the destruction of openness and trust in the open-source community, which has far more reaching consequences. What has been done is pretty unprecedented - and dangerous.
And I’m surprised other Linux communities are silent on the matter.
I was wondering why some of the comments were being maliciously dense and then I realised the commentators were smug aspiring redditors
You should stay on reddit.world or sh.itjust.twerks telling your fellow Redditors about how we need to send billions of dollars to foreign wars that RAND corporation and Chatham House have admitted they never intended to win (they thought Russians would overthrow their own government if enough Ukrainian men and adolescents die on the battlefield long enough, pure strategic genius, Zapp Brannigan would be proud).
Seems like you are the one drinking the Kremlin Kool-Aid tbh. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is deeply unpopular, because it’s such blatant imperialism. They are trying to re-vassalise Ukraine, same as they did with Georgia. Simple as. Putin still has delusions of empire and cold-war era “spheres of influence”, and his pretexts for the invasion are paper thin to anyone not drinking Putin’s Kool-Aid. Support for the Ukrainians has nothing to do with Western propaganda - it’s got to do with the fact that Putin has made it very clear what his end game is, and nobody except Putin and his gross coalition of authoritarians, religious extremists and dictators want to give Russia the chance to strongarm/invade its way into becoming the USSR again. Having said all that, I’ve got nothing against Russian programmers working on open source software. Unlike yourself, I’m perfectly capable of distinguishing between the actions of a State and its citizens, many/most of whom are no doubt decent people.
You act as if we killed your dog. There is nothing stopping you from moving on. You can jump to an instance that is more agreeable to you or you could create a big block list. However, lemmyml has earned a bad rep from the rest of the community.
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.
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 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.
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.
it isn’t like Americans would do that, right?
But where do you have information that it was russian state? There are many state actors capable of doing this. Just saying
Even Wikipedia, which is a shockingly bloodthirsty pro-NATO outlet, admits there is zero proof that a “Russian state actor” did this, there are just “western security experts” claiming it (as usual), and opinion is divided.
Did you even read this or do you just vaguely remember a Wired article? I have been able to see through these obvious ploys since I was a teenager reading about cold war propaganda (okay that was like 5 years ago but still SMDH)
Great sign for discussion that hacking is still being treated by Redditors as Russian, Chinese, and North Korean until proven otherwise. 🤕
Even Wikipedia, which is a shockingly bloodthirsty pro-NATO outlet, admits there is zero proof that a “Russian state actor” did this, there are just “western security experts” claiming it (as usual), and opinion is divided.
Well, I don’t think that a “[insert your preferred state] state actor” would ever coming out saying “yes, we tried to to it”.
Not to say that what Wikipedia say is false but on the other hand I am not sure how to check if it is true, in these cases.
It’s literally just speculation. Even if it were true, what the fuck does that have to do with the nationality of a few Linux contributors? Have you people cracked?
@griefstricken @chaogomu Seems to me, after the Stuxnet incident, any US claims of bad foreign actors are a bad case of the pot calling the kettle black.
The funny thing is Stuxnet is a good example of how sanctions can backfire. We used a supply chain attack and the Iranians hardened their systems. Can anyone really claim it was any different than another Mossad “humiliate them and hope something happens” operation that ultimately blew the cover off years of intelligence work?
The Lebanon pagers attack, Russian sanctions and CERN or Linux creating reverse brain drain will continue to backfire, on our ability to even twist these screws, also on our supply chains in countries which consider themselves a US target or even just a middleman.
Lol
I wonder if there are any official US documents declaring an intent to hide cyberattacks under the flags of foreign nations? 🤭 Wouldn’t that be droll?
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.
yup. these so called “open” projects are being kneecapped in the name of American empire and Linus is celebrating it.
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?
Oh! No, you’re not a Russian puppet account. I was saying the next time the Russian troll farm needs new names try the ones I linked.
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.
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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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.
All those guns are for show, I guess.
Fuck off.
Fact is you know I am right, you just don’t have any principles. You seem baffled some people uphold principles.
“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?
“Compliance requirements”? The kernel’s american now?! WTF?
Nope, but it is not above the law.
Which law under which jurisdiction?
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?
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
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.
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 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.
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
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
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?
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. ┻━┻︵ (°□°)/ ︵ ┻━┻
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.
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
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.
@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
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.
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.
Open-source is politics.
MKTux
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.
Well for what its worth there are other counties outside of Russia
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
