He didn’t expel all Russians, just the ones working for sanctioned Russian companies.
I think given the current political situation this is the right call. No one knows what the Russian government might compel otherwise innocent devs to do.
That said, we (and I mean society, not any particular individual) should be mindful that we don’t slip into bigotry.
Linus is from Finland. Finns barely tolerate Russians under usual circumstances. These are not usual circumstances.
True he could have banned them long ago, it’s his project in the end, but he didn’t, he only did it after the sanctions
Sound like they are racists to me
Linus’s dad was a Finnish communist and lived in USSR for some time, one can say a VIP person. You actually lack the context to realize how important this is. Many people of such connections (not accusing Linus, no) are usually still connected to Russia’s regime more than, ahem, me. The documents about just whom that encompasses are still secret in Russian archives. Well, technically one can get a permission, but random people are refused it.
Finns barely tolerate Russians under usual circumstances.
Yes, we know that, massacring Russian civilian population during 1917-1918 and then doing that David-n-Goliath thing in the Winter War, which is the only thing they want to remember, and then 1941-1945 with Finnish troops participating in the blockade of Lengingrad and making concentration camps for civilian population, again.
I don’t get how that should work in Linus’s favor, though.
Oh, and also during the Cold War the foreign country most integrated into USSR’s MIC was Finland. Not something of the Warsaw Pact ones, but Finland.
You’re telling me they barely tolerated building warships for USSR, right? Poor guys.
And then people in the Interwebs are asking why some average Russian doesn’t go and rebel or blow up FSB buildings or something. I wonder the fuck why.
That’s why.
Just so we’re clear, your opinion is that Russians working for sanctioned companies should remain as maintainers of the kernel because Torvalds is a Finn and that he’s obligated to Russia because “Finland bad”?
So, therefore, Putin can and should exploit access to the kernel via these Russian maintainers because Finland is somehow historically worse than the USSR?
Am I misunderstanding you?
No, just that things said are inconsistent and partially wrong
Fool blocked.
If he did that that would have been genuine discrimination. If he has to do it now because of sanctions, then ok fine. But otherwise I don’t want to see an open source project treating people differently based on where they were born.
Come on lemmy, how is this pro-racism comment upvoted so many times? Please, think.
Oh no, the treaty-breaking, nuke-threatening, war-crime-committing invading force is being discriminated against!
Holy shit, gtfo. Maybe don’t be an actual cunt if you don’t want people to “discriminate” against you? The guy didn’t even fire all Russians, only those tied to sanctioned companies. He did less than should’ve been done. But that’s only because what should be done to Russia at this point is assassinating their leader, disarming the country, executing the army, installing a puppet government that ensures economic and military inferiority, and selling tickets to piss on Putins grave for the rest of the world to blow off some steam.
Edit: here’s a view from a Russian, maybe that helps:
I feel the same way about Americans.
We’ll let you know as soon as we find a reason to respect your malformed opinion.
Look as long as your a NATO nation, we’re a perfectly peaceful and reasonable super power with a military that would scorch the earth to ash within 24 hours.
“Russian” is not a race.
It is genuine xenophobia. I like in Poland, and its like you’re either a homophobe, or a xenophobe- with pretty limited inbetween. (And there are plenty of people who are both)
And Russians are peaceophobes? 😆
Ah, yes. Russia. A paragon of moral societal standards and behavior.
Now do this with Israelis.
Save your sanity and do Settings -> Blocks -> Block instance -> lemmy.ml
Also perhaps block me if you strongly disagree with the above.
The whole Grad is seething I’m loving it.
Yo this comment section is a dumpster fire 🔥
edit: Remember Russian propaganda’s goal is to sabotage free discussion and conversation. They achieve this by e.g. shitting in a comment section. That might explain what’s going on here. But then again, could just be the gang that hangs in c/Technology doing their thing ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Linus in 2012: Nvidia fuck you
Linus in 2024: Russia fuck you
I wouldn’t want to have FSB agents maintaining my open source either.
russian economy after over 1k days of war is evaporized and putin now is Xis little dog. so if we all work together now nobody will remember a country called russia in 100 years. nations are just a phantasy and it wont hurt to let go of some.
How is this keeping to open source philosophies in any way?
“No, you can’t work on this, you’re Russian.”
I don’t support the Russian Government or its actions in any way, but these devs are probably not part of it. They maintain drivers for fucking ASUS hardware.
Because there are both US and EU laws preventing code from countries deemed a threat. Torvalds is paid by the Ameircan Linux Foundation, which has to work under US law and he himself is an EU citizen. Also a lot of other developers are from those countries and if they do not comply, they could get into some pretty bad legal trouble.
So it pretty much boils down to kick out the Russians or kick out all US and EU citizens and well we see Linus choice.
risc-v saw this coming a while ago and moved to Switzerland to avoid it.
Switzerland is being routinely strong-armed these days.
😯🤔 maybe I should look that up, where exactly 😂would be fun to work on RISC-V
You can work on RISC-V wherever you are, just post your patches publicly so anyone can get them, regardless of their jurisdiction.
Yea, just checked their job board, most is remote anyway 😂
And it’s also FOSS, so there’s nothing stopping you from working on it w/o officially working for them.
Do you also know Finland is next to russia and it does not have to be US influence for someone like Linus to know Russian gov can pressure developers? This change removes code commit not the contribution rights.
It’s not that hard of a choice either ofc, given one is essentially required.
That’s the start, of course. One could always play good cop, bad cop: “I have to do this to comply with the law, sorry, there’s nothing else I can do.” What Linus has done here is play bad cop, bad cop: “the law says I have to obey sanctions, and by the way I support the sanctions and this move anyway.”
He didn’t banned the Russians when the war started, he could, and probably wanted, but didn’t so what’s your point?
This has nothing to do with open source. If Russians want to work on the Linux kernel, they’re absolutely free to do so, because the source code is free and open source. What they are being restricted from is getting their changes submitted to the normal Linux foundation trees. FOSS doesn’t mean you’re entitled to have the maintainer of a project look at your patches, it means you can use the software however you want.
And yeah, it makes me sad that Russian kernel maintainers are being excluded. That doesn’t mean it’s a violation of open source philosophies (a maintainer can exclude anyone they want for any reason), it just means it’s an unfortunate policy due to international sanctions.
Russians aren’t restricted from getting their changes submitted, they just can’t be maintainers. This means that they need another maintainer to approve their changes, just like if you or me were to submit a change. A lot of people seem to be misunderstanding what actually happened.
I actually just emailed RMS about this and I’m genuinely curious what he says. If anyone else is interested, I’ll ask if he’s fine with me sharing some of the response.
Just what we need. The opinions of someone who thinks having sex with children is a good thing.
He never said that. I agree he was more skeptical than I’d like, but he eventually was informed and apologized.
You are mistaken:
“The nominee is quoted as saying that if the choice of a sexual partner were protected by the Constitution, ‘prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and pedophilia’ also would be. He is probably mistaken, legally–but that is unfortunate. All of these acts should be legal as long as no one is coerced. They are illegal only because of prejudice and narrowmindedness.”
RMS on June 28th, 2003
"I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren’t voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing. "
RMS on June 5th, 2006
"There is little evidence to justify the widespread assumption that willing participation in pedophilia hurts children.
RMS on Jan 4th, 2013
None of those say it is good. I disagree with him, he also disagrees with him and apologized for saying that. But that is very different from saying its good. I don’t think alcohol is good, I also don’t think it should be illegal.
None of those say it is good
Huh?
He said it’s a shame that paedophilia is outlawed and that it was narrow-mindedness that made it so.
He said it’s untrue that having sex with children harms them.
And yeah, he later apologised and said he doesn’t believe it anymore… 2 days after his job became on the line.
Ask yourself this:
A man has been publicly championing raping children for decades. Publicly. He firmly believes he should have the right to fuck children.
News media hears about this, and now his job seems untenable.
All of a sudden, the man claimed changed his mind, that he’s completely reversed his opinion (that he held for decades and publicly shouted to the world). In just 2 days, he’s gone from thinking it’s a tragedy that you can’t fuck children, to thinking fucking a child is bad.
Do you believe him? Or do you think he’s just saying anything he can to try to keep his job?
I don’t think alcohol is good, I also don’t think it should be illegal.
There’s a big difference between “it’s unfortunate that adults can’t fuck children, it really should be legalised. People against fucking toddlers are just bigots” and “well I don’t like alcohol, but I think it should be legal”
How you just equated raping a child and drinking a glass of wine is beyond me. Wow.
Oh yes, an update would be really interesting! (Even though I agree with @sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works in all points.)
My opinion on this whole topic: I don’t like the decision, a Free Software project should only prevent people from contributing in very rare occasions (e.g. having actively tried to sabotage the project). I don’t think this was the case, because I presume that the Linux Foundation was forced by the U.S. government to kick the maintainers out. The should’ve also communicated more clearly to prevent the confusion. (Russian trolls will cry out no matter how they phrased that.)
Edit: Depending on their power as a maintainer, they might be hired by intelligence and forced to just wave a backdoor through. With the Russian government waging a hybrid war against the U.S. and Europe, this poses a real problem.
Another Edit: @Allero@lemmy.today mentioned that apart from Russia, the U.S., Israel and China also have a very well funded intelligence service. So banning Russian maintainers because of a potential backdoor when there are American maintainers (which could be agents) as well? I don’t think it makes sense, but unfortunately the Linux Foundation won’t be able to resist the “complience requirements”.
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The central project of open-source community closes doors to people based on nationality, and everyone is cheering…
Why? You seriously miss the implications of breaking the very basic principles of open source? You are ready to forgive literally anything if it is claimed to target Russia or Russians in any way?
For those of you who say about backdoors:
- US is known to create the most complicated spy networks with myriads of backdoors. Where are the bans of the US maintainers?
- Israel is a literal powerhouse of state-sanctioned spying software - Pegasus, as well as many less renowned programs, was created here. Any bans, anyone?
- China is known for invasive software. Maybe ban them all too?
The only reasonable way to avoid backdoors is to meticulously check the submitted code. Threat actors can be anywhere - and Russia is not some unique threat location, nor was it banned with that justification - just “compliance requirements”.
This is politics permeating the sacred place we all had. This is a giant threat to the community, and the way Linus framed it in his message is even more terrifying. This was never meant to happen.
The only reasonable way to avoid backdoors is to meticulously check the submitted code.
Which is the job of maintainers. Which now aren’t Russian, any more. To the best of my knowledge the kernel is still accepting code from Russian citizens, ultimately not having Russians in maintainer roles isn’t going to stop the FSB from infiltrating the kernel but it certainly does make it harder.
This also isn’t in any way a judgement on the removed people, it’s just that it so happens that if you’re a Russian citizen you’re quite vulnerable to wrench attacks. You could even say that the kernel org is protecting them from being used like that.
“Protective restrictions” is a code for discrimination. Or would you argue that not allowing, idk, women to vote is a good measure for protecting them against being violently coerced to vote one way or another?
(this is a random example, just a small mark so I wouldn’t be eaten alive)
breaking the very basic principles of open source?
No, the basic principles of open source are either the four freedoms (if you agree w/ Stallman) or the OSI open source definition. Here are Stallman’s four freedoms:
- The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
- The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
- The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).
- The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
Russians still have these freedoms WRT the Linux kernel. They can still run, study, and redistribute modified versions of the Linux kernel. There’s no violation here.
And the OSI definition is similar (and longer, so I won’t repeat it here).
No part of the definitions of open source or free software obligate a maintainer to work with anyone else, the only obligations are to the legal freedom of the code. Russians can still use, modify, and redistribute the software, they just aren’t allowed to have maintainer positions within the Linux foundation. They can still submit code, and it’s up to the maintainers if they choose to look at that code.
That said, I’m sad that it has come to this. I hate the idea of international politics interfering w/ FOSS, but I still maintain that it’s 100% fine for Linus Torvalds (and his legal counsel) to make this call. So I agree with the core of your argument, that politics interfering w/ FOSS is bad, but I disagree that it violates any part of the basic concept of FOSS, FOSS maintainers should always be able to decide who they work with, and the rest of the community gets to decide if they’re okay with that or if they’d rather follow someone else’s fork.
Fair on your part, I might’ve gone too far with my argument.
I was talking more about collaborative nature and what happens to it when the major open-surce project decides to gatekeep based on something highly arbitrary.
Linux is long past a simple hobby project, and it should be managed responsibly and with respect to the people that make this all happen.
Sure, the roots of FOSS came from collaboration, with people sharing code between universities and whatnot. But the process has always been “here are my changes, take them if you like.” So even the term “collaboration” is a bit of a stretch, since it was almost always a bunch of solo efforts and people would pull in the changes they like. The idea of any kind of structure to FOSS development was added later to help organize it, but the foundation was always someone working on a thing and then advertising those changes for others to pull, if they wanted.
A collaborative project would work something like Python where a core team decides which features to add (i.e. PEPs), and people on the dev team or the community at large would develop those features, and any development that’s not part of those approved features tend to be rejected until it goes through the review process.
Linux isn’t particularly collaborative in that sense, it’s more like the old-school FOSS development process where individual developers would build a thing, use it themselves, and then submit their changes for upstream consideration. I worked on a team where we maintained our own kernel patches separate from upstream for years before trying to submit them upstream, and every time we’d upgrade the kernel, we’d have to reapply the patches, occasionally fixing some things that had changed. The network of maintainers is largely a convenience for working in this more chaotic model, where maintainers are responsible for reviewing and passing along changes for a certain area of the kernel, they don’t actually guide development in any meaningful way.
So the main change here is that Russian contributors can still contribute, they just aren’t trusted as inner-circle reviewers. It’s still collaborative in the same sense that it has always been, there’s just a bit more scrutiny over which reviews to trust.
I’m actually shocked by how people are acting about this.
You see, it’s actually a really bad thing to ban devs from an open source project based on nationality over all else. “Oh, but they are state actors!!!” How do you know? Because they are Russian?
It seems they’re not being removed because they’re Russian, but instead because they work for specific companies who are subject to US sanctions:
OK, this is bs.
They’re not banning devs, they’re banning maintainers.
Russians can submit as many patches as they like for review, they just can’t sign off on their commits themselves.
Seems pretty fair to me.
I’m actually shocked
I’m not. Ever since the war, every single closet xenophobe of the west has been taking full advantage of finally having an acceptable group of subhumans to hate. If any of this surprises you, you haven’t been paying attention.
Exactly! Being Russian doesn’t mean having any political affiliation.
Moreover, even Russia the state is adopting Linux and is greatly disinterested in messing it up. If anything, this could really be the attack on Linux-reliant Russian infrastructure, but even then it most likely will be a reason for a fork, no more, no less.
Torvalds responses make clear he has spent too much time with the wrong people. Calling everyone paid actors is such an embarrassment to his own intelligence. When the linux kernel starts falling behind because of a lack of competent maintainers after banning any country that NATO isnt friends with, we will know that this is where it started and that people cheered.
Yeah, arguing that everyone disagreeing is a paid Russian troll is a cherry on top.
So you think Russian trolls wouldn’t want to spin this narrative? By virtue of what? Honor?
No, I just say that writing down any disagreement to the evil intentions of someone in power is extremely counterproductive.
There is plenty of people who are in sincere disagreement over this decision, and Linus just tries to silence them. This ain’t alright and leads to direct abuse of power.
This is literally a chapter of an authoritarian playbook.
Russians can still contribute code, don’t bundle those together just to have something to list. You are correct about pegasus, but this is about kernel and rights to commit without review.
Open source IP laws operate under the jurisdiction of the citizen’s country. What kind of principles do you think open source represents? Because if it’s about free movement of information and global collaboration, I’m pretty sure that pirates are the group that better represents those values
Arrrgh!
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True, but it seems like they were mostly united by just having Russian e-mail domains. Some also worked on support for Baikal CPUs, but they are essentially a failed product now.
Also, the personal response of Linus is a clear F*** you to Russians in particular, so he kinda cleared this out, at least on the level of “I don’t give a damn about Russians whatsoever, they’re evil”
Yeah well getting invaded by a country twice in living memory will do that to you.
Germany’s like: “uh-oh”
Germany is repentant of their past.
Russia wants to return to it.
Russia, or Putin?
Both.
The comment right above you is fantasising about how America will have to disarm russia and execute the army and install a puppet government. It’s not that people don’t care about America, it’s that they cheer for it’s crimes.
in today’s political landscape: genocide is acceptable and ignorable; progressives are dirty commies that you should ignore at all costs; and being russian is enough to get you kicked out of contributions to FOSS and all this comes from people who call themselves “liberal”.
A lemmy.ml user criticising others for supposedly believing genocide is acceptable. Remarkable.
Russia is committing a genocide in Ukraine.
Some sanctioned Russian companies can no longer have maintainers in the kernel. Boo fucking hoo.
And kicked out of all FOSS contributions? Why are you lying? Russians can still contribute.
I’m surprised how many people treat GPL to ignore borders. The IP law still operates only by the rules your country decides.
I can understand the desire for information to be free, but unless Open source movement becomes it’s own country the discussion should end there.
You have to be arguing in bad faith if you’re trying to say “citizens of nation shouldn’t be responsible for their nation”
The open source benefit is not that they can directly impact it, it’s that their government can’t
You know. I don’t like what the Russian leadership and military are doing. I feel like ultimately we’re in the cold war era. But you know, at the height of the cold war, radio operators around the world still worked Russian stations.
Yes, there was a very clear policy, neither side talked about ANYTHING beyond their signal report and working conditions (information about radio, power output and aerial basically). At the height of the actual cold war, the individuals were not cancelled like this.
Sanction the leadership, sanction the money, and sanction the military. But the normal people that are subject to the propaganda? I don’t understand the benefit in doing this. I also don’t see how the sanctions effect an open source project…
Seems a bit weird. Maybe there’s information we’re not privy to, but on the face of it, just based on what we’re seeing. Seems like a very very odd move.
don’t understand the benefit in doing this.
FSB wants backdoor in kernel. FSB notices subsystem maintainer is Russian, lives in Chelyabinsk. Can close eyes to backdoor, can pretend to review. FSB in Moscow make call to FSB in Chelyabinsk telling to buy heavy wrench at hardware store.
Same could be said for any intelligence service . it is better to focus on preventing and detecting these things through analysis and code reviews.
And they could just offer boatloads of cash to someone in another country to insert something so this doesn’t really prevent anything it only isolates a certain subset of people.
So if we can’t completely 100% deal with a problem, we shouldn’t even try? I mean, you’re correct, but we can’t solve all problems at once. If we deal with at least one, then we’ve made progress. Then we can try to deal with the next one.
No but this doesn’t do anything to “deal” with the problem as anyone can built up trust like Jian tan showed. The argument that this makes us more secure is like saying closed source is more secure cause the hackers dont have access to the source.
We have evidence of the US messing with nist standards so by that same logic should we assume all us actors are bad ?
The solution is to verify the code maybe have multiple people from different locations have to review stuff. Build more checks into the process.
The whole point of it being open is that it can be reviewed. It shouldn’t matter where the contributor is from as all code should be subjected to a rigorous review process.
We have evidence of the US messing with nist standards
What… You realize that NIST is literally a government agency? It’s part of the United States Department of Commerce. It’s literally the US government. Are you saying that the government is messing with itself? What does that even mean?
If that were true, surely they’d not trust ANY of their existing work, or at least any done since the Special War Operation. Wouldn’t that make sense?
They’ve left the code, and removed the people arbitrarily. Seems a bit off to me.
I don’t think this only happens now, governments like Russia, USA, China, Israel will likely always be making these attempts.
I don’t understand the benefit in doing this.
Security. Torvalds did this for security.
Is it really that hard to parse?
And I’ll say the same here as I did above. If it was for security, their code is tainted too. It’s an arbitrary reaction that is not complete as a solution to anything.
They can check existing code. You have to be able to trust people who are contributing.
They can check new code by these risky people as it comes in, but it why risk it?
You can’t untaint code if the tainters (lol that sounds funny) can still edit the code.
If Torvalds is correct (he is), patching can now take place for vulnerabilities.
Good point!
Well it seems it was more to do with sanctions, if the open letter from one of the chopped developers is to be believed. In which case, I think the right thing is to move the names to contributors (they did still contribute), remove them from maintainers (some maintainers are actually paid by the foundation, I mean not a lot, but some are paid).
I still find it all a little odd. But likely there was a bit of a prod from somewhere higher as to how sanctions should be followed.
I am on your side and don’t understand the fury of down votes in this section regarding this stance. I am from a shit hole of a country too and if my life long contribution to open science (hypothetically speaking) could be so completely disregarded because of something ultra shitty that my country did, I would be super sad and probably mad at the OS community for leaving me behind so quickly.
I also don’t understand the benefit of doing this. Most people seem to claim it’s for security reasons but that does not make sense to me. Closing doors to someone without any proof of malintent is so against open source philosophy that it is perhaps more damaging in its core. And being the kind of government Russia is (or for that matter Israel, China, USA etc etc) they will always try to gain cyber war advantage by such methods. This approach is therefore clearly unsustainable. You would only be able to give dev access to a handful of countries in the world.
It sure as hell won’t scratch a dent in the Russian government’s armor when all these sanctions did not. It is not going to achieve 1/1000th of what all those ambargoes, frozen accounts etc aimed and failed to achieve.
Therefore there is either missing information (external pressure to take this action) or this is simply an action based on personal judgement.
Therefore there is either missing information (external pressure to take this action) or this is simply an action based on personal judgement.
Looking at the other post about NVidia drivers, I am starting to wonder if western governments (or perhaps just the US) are going after large orgs and suggesting how current sanctions should be interpreted. In which case, not sure I can then blame the Linux foundation, since you know, you don’t need government heavy breathing down your neck.
