Phoronix: Linus Torvalds Comments On The Russian Linux Maintainers Being Delisted

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"...

"Bcachefs sucks because I use ext4"

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.

That's a fair point. I rarely read comments on news articles, but morbid curiosity overpowered my self-preservation instinct.

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.

And the most dangerous part here is the whole rethoric of "if you disagree, you are a Russian shill".

At this point it’s the Russians peoples fault.

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

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.

FOSS is inherently political though, but I guess you mean country vs country politics moreso than ideological 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

The F in FOSS stands for politics

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.

Switzerland is controlled by the US

It makes no sense to discuss here.They probably follow Russia's narrative of Europe being a puppet of the US.

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/

I doubt if someone wants to introduce a backdoor, they would do that with a russian mailing address. People removed were open and transparent about their nationalities which means there is even less chance them being bad actors than some random guy pretending to be American.

I think you’re making up a world in your head. Who are these “lots” of “good” Russians who are abroad and whose lives are in realistically danger of state assassination? Not that it has never happened, but you’re blowing things out of proportion. Probably Russia does it at a scale roughly similar to the US.

“The imperial core is sanctioning Russia therefore you are a Russian troll.” Impeccable logic.

They'll fight over fonts meanwhile WordPress is on fire and where are the forks?

Or a name

The bad precedent was starting a war

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.

Linus said it was to prevent security backdoors.

OK, that's the first reasonable explanation I've come across. I wish Greg Linus didn't reply in that kind of "angry" tone, because for some of us it's not that obvious.

Yeah, it seems like they genuinely are just trying to be compliant with the law. I do think the "anyone who has concerns about this is a Russian troll" thing is obnoxious though, knowing of the existence of sanctions doesn't mean we're all lawyers who know the requirements here for open source projects.

Underrated comment.

Sanctions apply on OS development?

I dont know ennough on the topic, does this ecen check out?

Yes, but this action sounds as effective against Russian espionage as burning any clothes that has red blue and white in them.

Phobia, by definition, is uncontrollable, irrational, and lasting fear for something. In the current geopolitics situation I'd say that it's not uncontrollable and very much not irrational. Fear, as a fellow Finn, might be a bit strong word, but it's a definetly a concern.

When I first read that I thought that the response is a bit harsh, as Russian (and Soviet Union) individuals have traditionally been a big part of open source community and their achievements on computing are pretty significant, but when you dig a bit deeper on that, a majority of Soviet era things are actually built by Ukrainians in Kyiv (obviously Ukraine as a country wasn't a thing back then).

Also, based on my very limited sight on the matter, Russians are not banned from contributing, but this is more of an statement that anyone working for the government in Russia can't be a part of kernel development team. There's of course legal reasons for that, very much including the trade bans against Russia, but also the moral part of it, which Linus seems to take a stand on.

Personally I've seen individuals at Russia to do quite amazing feats with both hardware and software, but as none of us are in a void without any external infcluence nor affect, I think that, while harsh, the "sanctions" (for a lack of better word) aren't overshooting anything, but they're instead leveling the playing field. Any Joe Anynymous could write a code which compromises the kernel as a whole, but should that Joe live in Russia, it might bring a government backed team which can hide their tracks on a quite a bit different level with their resources than any individual could ever even dream about.

So, while that decision might slow down some implementations and it might include some of the most capable of developers, the fear that one of them might corrupt the whole project isn't unreasonable and, with ongoing sanctions in place (and legal requirements that follow) the core dev team might not even have a choice on this.

In current global environment we're living in, I'd rather have a bit too careful management than one which doesn't take things seriously enough. We already have Canonical and others to break stuff way too often, we don't need malicious government to expand on that with nefarious purposes which could compromise a shit on of stuff on a very fundamental level if left unattended.

All it takes is reading the article to see why it was done. You clearly did not do that and instead inserted your own agenda.

Fuck Russia. Pretty good reason.

He just applied Russians’ favorite soviet era saying “those who is not with us is against us”

Nah. If anything, USian and non-Russian companies will add one or two more devs to their efforts to take up the slack. Linux is the bedrock of their revenue streams.

That sounds like an advice, not something official? Also why is an open source project affected by US sanctions? It's not an US open source project, or is it?

I understand, thank you. My statement kind of assumes north korea is maintaining a fork of the kernel they patch and customize. It also implies NK is one of the few organizations that would accept russian contributions into their fork, given the somewhat limited number of linux projects operating outside of the sanctions.

How does this prevent the Russians from accessing sensitive technology? Oh it doesn't! It just excludes them from contributing to Linux, not from using it.

Accusing others from "arguing in bad faith" are we?

This might not be super useful if you don't write code but I always found the contest submissions fun to read and try to figure out for the https://www.underhanded-c.org/ contest.

They break down and explain the runner up and finalist for each year and how the attack works. It's usually something very subtle that most people wouldn't catch.

It means supporters of the dominant ideology if capitalism, just like it has always meant.