Posted by ajb 10/24/2024
I don’t care about the Russians shenanigans but I’m dumbfounded by the lack of transparency, the obvious racism, from Linus.
Also, at least try to say that you do care about "the Russians shenanigans" (but you can also don't support the incident as well), because it's also a highly political matter and inducing any useless emotion is just as bad as Linus' reply.
> Russian shenanigans
I do care about the conflict and hope for a swift victory by Ukraine, but in this instance it could have been anyone really. It doesn’t matter these people are Russians: Linus, to comply with “legal requirements”, threw out maintainers without giving an actual reason. If he is so eager to comply with legal requirements now, I wonder what he — he or any other software maintainer — would do were the “legal requirements” be for an unjust cause; countries shouldn’t dictate who can and cannot work for FOSS projects.
And on the matter of “we are the good guys, nothing can go wrong”: In EU politicians tried to make cryptography useless again, and while I don’t believe the law will pass I can’t help but wonder if FOSS maintainers, just like Linus, will happily comply.
While my point might be already a lost cause (sigh), I believe this distinction is very important because we don't know how to do open governance in general. We have a relatively strong case for F/OSS licensing mainly because it was easy to follow and therefore spreaded like fire. But every sizable project trying open governance is different from each other. In this regard:
> countries shouldn’t dictate who can and cannot work for FOSS projects.
This statement is irrelevant because it was the maintainers' decision to decide "who can and cannot work" for the Linux kernel. It's just your ideal---and honestly speaking, also my ideal---, and most real world F/OSS projects suffer from at least one issue against that ideal. We can't talk about how to achieve or move closer to the ideal without the correct understanding of terminology and situation, which your comment did (and still) miss. For example, the correct starting point would be this: why did many large projects have to create legal entities in some jurisdiction?
I wonder what would you think projects like signal, but the FOSS community too, should do if the “chat control” law actually passed in Europe.
EDIT: if, as you say it doesn’t exist in a legal vacuum, then FOSS is worthless and, I reiterate, just free labor for corporations
I submit patches to projects operated by companies all the time, and I generally don't care who runs the project (whether it's a company or a hobbyist). I do this only because it benefits me directly. It probably helps other people too, but they're not my problem. The company making money is also not my problem.
I fix a bug or add a feature, which I was going to do anyway. I get that change merged upstream. I can then happily use my Linux distribution's packages (or some other downstream dependency) without wasting monstrous amounts of time replacing those packages with my own locally maintained version.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-German_sentiment
"The Justice Department attempted to prepare a list of all German aliens, counting approximately 480,000 of them. The Committee of Internment of Alien Enemies recommended sending them to internment camps, though the idea was opposed by the War Department and the Attorney General. More than 4,000 German aliens were imprisoned in 1917–1918. The allegations included spying for Germany and endorsing the German war effort.
When the United States entered the war in 1917, some German Americans were looked upon with suspicion and attacked regarding their loyalty. Propaganda posters and newspaper commentary fed the growing fear. In Wisconsin, a Lutheran minister faced suspicion for hosting Germans in his home, while a language professor was tarred and feathered for having a German name and teaching the language. The Red Cross barred individuals with German last names from joining in fear of sabotage. One person was killed by a mob; in Collinsville, Illinois, German-born Robert Prager was dragged from jail as a suspected spy and lynched. Some aliens were convicted and imprisoned on charges of sedition for refusing to swear allegiance to the United States war effort. Thousands were forced to buy war bonds to show their loyalty."
I can imagine technological "divorces" will happen more often going forward, as the polarization between the G7 and the BRICS++ members grows.
The author of the linked article suggests that they should get some form of memorialization. When Linus is finished berating Sam for working at Halliburton during the Iraq war, something that by analogy I guess he has every right to do, this advice should probably be taken.
No, they aren't, in general international law. They may be between partners in a multilateral agreement that provides trade terms, but they are specifically allowed on national security grounds within the largest such organization and the only one I am aware of where both the US and Russian Federation are members, the WTO, under GATT Article XXI(b).
This isn't about Russian Americans, though. This is about Russian developers working for Russian companies that are involved in the actual war.
It's not like one side is completely innocent, while other side is pure evil.
The irony is that some neonazis in european countries who used to make jokes about gaz chambers are currently calling out parties expressing concern about Israel politics as antisemitists and islamists.
State level actors won't be using such "flagged" companies as their delivery method; see Jia Tan.
We can't open a discussion about obfuscated FSB patches if we aren't going to ask what we're doing about obsfucated NSA patches.
This is about being listed as a contact. You can EITHER work for a company that produces CPUs for the Russian army OR answer mail on behalf of the linux kernel maintainers, but not both.
The only possible justification for this is the one being offered, that some lawyers do not believe it is safe for Linus to head a project with ties that could be made real to a jury between its leaders and sanctioned entities.
Considering the fact that individual people need to stay out of court as badly as they need to avoid being convicted this is not such a difficult decision to empathize with, but it is being conducted in a typical Kernel fashion, with personal views being injected at all the worst moments and contributors leaving who would not have had any quarrels if they had not been fabricated.
In this case: Pity for the guys who build Putin's glide bombs.
USA? Russia? China? Israel? North Korea? Iran?