this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2024
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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.
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.
Oh yes, an update would be really interesting! (Even though I agree with @[email protected] 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: @[email protected] 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".
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.
I think people didn’t understand that I am joking 😅
Yeah, wasn't sure because RISC-V is showing up in commercial products now, so you could absolutely be referring to an actual paid job.
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?