As a finn, I understand that there are probably legal reasons for doing this.
I just wish they would be transparent and share those reasons with us. The Linux kernel is certainly not the only free software project that is impacted, if this comes straight from EU/US sanctions. Maintainers of other projects have a lot of interest in what is happening.
Transparency is also important because if EU/US policy/sanctions are causing issues for free software projects, then that discussion needs to be public, so that there is a chance to amend the policies if necessary.
The legal reasons was because the Linux Foundation is based in the USA and the targeted devs worked for companies explicitly sanctioned by the USA. Linus said he knew and trusted the devs he was forced to delist.
The Linux Foundation needs to relocate to some stable neutral country like Switzerland.
Switzerland is controlled by the US
Suggest a country then
Politics should not be on FOSS development.
FOSS is inherently political though, but I guess you mean country vs country politics moreso than ideological politics.
The F in FOSS stands for politics
That is hardcore wishful thinking, the nature by which critical digital infrastructure is developed and maintained is of keen importance to political systems everywhere. This situation was inevitable with the ongoing escalation of war
That’s why the “should be” I guess, though that’s not to say there aren’t idiots (right in this thread too) actually shilling for this.
If current open source licenses still have flaws like this, we’re gonna need new ones.
It has to be there, because politics is connected with lawmaking, and open source software is dependent on laws.
A lot of people like to say that politics isn’t in their life or that they keep politics out of their life, but the reality is that’s just not true. The rules that govern society affect you, always, either with or without your input, either with or without your acknowledgment.
You’re probably trying to say that we should keep pointless politicking out of open source software, and I agree, but that’s going to come down to personal definitions of pointlessness.
We’re gonna start seeing large open source communities start to break into smaller ones because of sanctions from now aren’t we?
You don’t need sanctions. I’ve seen you petty fucks fork projects over a font.
They’ll fight over fonts meanwhile WordPress is on fire and where are the forks?
Or a name
BringFork out the GIMP!gimp-qt
:3
This sets such a bad precedent…
The bad precedent was starting a war
Yeah I’m sure the maintainers are in talks with Putin directly
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If/when the Russian government comes knocking on their door and tells them that they need to do x, y, and z with the kernel
CIA could do that too.
Ah yes. The Finnish CIA.
They have one?
Any moderator want to actually let me know why my comment was removed, or…?
Is pointing out the dangers of working in an autocratic nation against the rules?
I can see the comment dude.
Arguably, ITAR set the precedent in the 1990’s during the crypto wars. USians used to have to travel to Canada to work on cryptographic code in OpenBSD because their commits couldn’t legally be exported.
This article gives a good discussion about a potential coming East/West political split in the world of FOSS.
https://thenewstack.io/avoiding-a-geopolitical-open-source-apocalypse/
Shit like this is why I use the most generic yankee cowboy aliases online.
He alludes to sanctions being a factor but never clarifies on advice from his lawyers. ngl I don’t like the look of it just from a transparency perspective.
Probably because the advice in question was lengthy and technical (subtype: laws and legality), and the short form had the disclaimer "Please don’t publish the short form because it’s too much like giving legal advice.) Something similar happened back in 2012 with Project Byzantium, when we were consulting with the EFF with respect to having cryptographic libraries included in the distro.
Hey - an explanation. Who’da’thunk it?
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are the tankies in the room with us right now
Lemmy was built by communists. you would be better served by going back to Reddit.
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Based Linus as always
Huh. Lot of people Russian’ to conclusions in this thread.
Sorry.
Shhh. Let Linus Finnish.
Ok, dad.
Sorry for liking it.
The comments under the article are a special kind of braindead.
Always is with Phoronix comments.
You find everything there from “Gnome is satanist” all the way up to pro-genocide crap.
I really don’t know what it is about the site that brings out the craziest souch.
The absolute disregard of having any moderation is what does that. If there was any, there wouldn’t be the cases like having someone be there by their third account, after the first two got banned.
Not to mention that controversy = angry people and trolls = more clicks = more ad revenue. I don’t think Michael wants to miss out on it.
For half a second there, I was like “yeah, so glad Lemmy is more rational than that site”.
Few comments later, folks be talking about “Ukranian Nazis”…
Wholesome banderite chungus
I would wager that every country has far-right elements, including Russia.
What Russia claims though is that the Ukrainian government is full of Nazis, which I don’t think is true.
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Edgy tweens being edgy.
I just smoked weed and … smoked weed.
are you a CIA bot or what? since when did people start ignoring facts and just repeat state department or fed propaganda? very strange.
🤣
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Hoo boy, you weren’t kidding. I find it amazing how quickly this went from “the kernel team is enforcing sanctions” to an an unfriendly abstract debate about the definition of liberalism. I shouldn’t, really, but I still am.
Hahaha I saw the parent commentor of that chain notorious for getting into back and forth arguments, sometimes reasonable sometimes not, and I thought to myself, this is going to be fun. Then I recognized the username of that other .ml user as a known troll and I was like, yep now this is going to go way off the rails.
“Bcachefs sucks because I use ext4”
Yeah. Why is everyone saying this is removing their contribution credits? It’s just a list of active maintainers…
This is not an unusual comment section on Phoronix, to put it mildly.
That’s a fair point. I rarely read comments on news articles, but morbid curiosity overpowered my self-preservation instinct.
Banning Israeli contributers too?
Unironically I would support it
I would never. The idea that any person should be disbarred from contributing to FOSS due to the actions of their government, is incredibly exclusionary. Linus is acting as much like a toddler as daddy USA is.
The west is sanctioning Russia because their daddy US tells them to. Similarly they don’t sanction Israel because of daddy.
No, it’s not like Israel is attacking its neighbors. It doesn’t, does it?
It’s not about punishing Russia, is admit preventing vulnerability to a country that has an ongoing effort to compromise infosec.
Not at all saying Israel doesn’t suck balls right now.
a country that has an ongoing effort to compromise infosec.
Any confirmation, that these specific maintainers were compromising something?
They would never!
ALL of them? Not at once. Usually.
Linus has never been the best communicator, but he usually speaks the truth. But this is just bonkers and wrong. Not everyone living in Russia has “ties with Russia” other than “they were born there”. If this is about sanctions, he could have still just told them that. But instead he just disrespected contributors completely and then double down in it by being xenophobic.
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Yup. If you don’t want to “mysteriously fall from a window,” you do what they say.
I agree 100% with Linus here
[Citation needed]
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It’s really disappointing seeing Russian contributors being disrespected like this, the regime that rules Russia wasn’t entirely their fault, and allegiance, nationality, and ethnicity are all clearly different things
Also, wouldn’t a state sponsored Russian hacker pretend to be from the US or something anyway? No way they’d contribute code as a Russian, that’d just increase others’ suspicion
I agree with Linus a lot too but I strongly disagree here. I hope he’s just being made to say this because of government policies
At this point it’s the Russians peoples fault.
could you elaborate on why?
And the most dangerous part here is the whole rethoric of “if you disagree, you are a Russian shill”.
I don’t understand how sanctions can impact free software, tbh, what’s free about this? This leaves a weird taste, I have to admit.
Linux foundation is a US company, and he’s a EU citizen and there’s companies that those devs where employed that are under sanction , hot that hard to understand
he’s a EU citizen
He’s also been a US citizen since 2010.
so are we okay with banning development time donated to foss because of nationality?
are these people found to support heinous shit or is this just wartime shenanigans?
Dude is Finnish, from his own mouth, it’s just normal racism against an aggressive imperial, like how people hate the us
Edit: like how people from lemmy.ml hate Americans, if that wasn’t clear
finland has pretty bad climate-change-exploitation-fucking-over-the-third-world dealings in my country, despite enforcing seemingly very good stuff inside their own borders so meh, id argue they aint close to the victims they make out to be. some would argue that as a consequence for having a strong socialist influence.
i have mixed feelings about them as a country, but i recognize there are plenty of good (and even well known good) people on there because of the aforementioned good stuff, linus included. for different but not that dissimilar reasons i think contemporary russian citizens should not be blanket banned from helping everyone out.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Karelian_concentration_camps
As if Finish people had any moral ground here
yeah i aint putting my ass on the line for that country, thats for sure.
It’s “for any county” to me. Nationalism is a cancer
Sure nice of Russia to look after only the breeding stock. Seems some things never change.
finland has pretty bad, climate-change-exploitation-fucking-over-the-third-world dealings in my country
Which country is that, and what dealings?
brazil, and they do some shady stuff in the amazon. mainly fuck you extrativism.
Can you find any links where one can read about this?
If Finland is wasting tax payer money to something shady, it should be brought to the local media.
heres one i found with a quick google.
this one is about southeast/northeast brazil, but the finnish are involved in aggressive extractivism in northwest brazil (amazon rainforest) too, and i think its even worse over there. you will dig up pretty horrible things if you do some research on it. about most of the western 1st world countries tbh.
Free as in… obeys US foreign policy
I’m pretty sure not just the US wants Russia sanctioned to the oblivion. All of the Europe that borders Russia wants that. Now why would it be like that?
It makes no sense to discuss here.They probably follow Russia’s narrative of Europe being a puppet of the US.
In the article, Linus explicitly said that it’s not just a US thing:
And FYI for the actual innocent bystanders who aren’t troll farm accounts - the “various compliance requirements” are not just a US thing.
That’s more like his opinion or a post facto justification. Turns out it is a US thing.
If your company is on the U.S. OFAC SDN lists, subject to an OFAC sanctions program, or owned/controlled by a company on the list, our ability to collaborate with you will be subject to restrictions, and you cannot be in the MAINTAINERS file.
So to get back, you have to basically prove that you have no relations with OFAC SDN companies.
This update is from https://lwn.net/Articles/995186/
