Posted by ajb 10/24/2024
> As to sending me a revert patch - please use whatever mush you call brains. I'm Finnish. Did you think I'd be supporting Russian aggression? Apparently it's not just lack of real news, it's lack of history knowledge too.
The concerning part to me is that kernel development will not only be based on technical discussion anymore (or maybe it never was): why would a revert patch or not has anything to do with nationalities or personal's political and hisotrical view. Bias towards either side to accept/reject technical contributions for such large project is only going to be harmful for the project regardless of open-source or not.
My guess is that some secretive agency got in contact with the Linux team. Whether this is about infiltration of kernel development or an attempt to stop Russia from powering its war machines by Linux I'm not so sure, but I don't know about any laws that would require this specific process.
As for "none of the maintainers today has done that aggression": they haven't _yet_, but they can be made to by their government if that's what Putin wants. Countries bordering Russia are on edge, and, as has been proven in Georgia and Ukraine, rightfully so. The current anti Russian sentiment isn't a consequence of any historic events as much as it is an anticipation of a Russian invasion in future.
I would much prefer knowing why exactly removing Russian contributors would be legally required, but given the secrecy surrounding it, I don't think there's much public information around it.
Sanctions don't move lockstep with military actions and neither do the courts that interpret and enforce the sanctions.
> If you haven't heard of Russian sanctions yet, you should try to read the news some day. And by "news", I don't mean Russian state-sponsored spam.
And the sentence right before that
> And FYI for the actual innocent bystanders who aren't troll farm accounts - the "various compliance requirements" are not just a US thing.
Meaning there is also valid legal reasons to do this with both the country he is living in (US) and the country he is from (Finland) having sanctions on the companies whose employees are being excluded. I think the is also a US citizen.
tl;dr; read the whole post instead of taking a single quote out of context.
There was some talk about banning Huawei access to AOSP but I don't think that ever went through.
And yes sanctions are weird. Finland is sanctioning a lot of Russian business including travel over the border for most part but still there is a train load of copper and nickel ore coming over every day or two.
I’m always in for making more clear and transparent processes though.
If BSD were forked, I can't see a practical reason why Linux can't be forked.
BRICS doesn't have a lot of real commonality of interests, but in the much more closely aligned RINK (Russia-Iran-North Korea) axis, there already is a forked Linux kernel underlying North Korea's Red Star OS (which also uses forks of Western software outside the kernel as part of the distro.)
What I don’t get is why individuals in sanctioned countries can’t submit their patches still?
The problem is that everyone outside the G7 lives under the constant threat of ever-expanding US sanctions. Successful open source projects will likely find ways to avoid being told who they can or cannot have contribute to them.
People are making drama out of nothing.