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.
What current situation?
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Is so hard to believe Open Source should be open? If there were a malicious intent, others would have been able to detect it in no time… because it is ‘open’! If the open system works, it should not matter there are CIA or FSB, commies or libertarians “infiltrated” making the code.
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If those Russians had been in that position is because their contributions have been stellar, otherwise they would never have gotten there. Their contribution and effort has been robbed from them just because they mothers give them birth in the wrong coordinates.
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Linus is a god for many of us… with human traits though… His Finland, although historically robbed by Russia, achieved its highest splendor during the decades of neutrality, not by fiercely antagonizing one or the other power… same as Switzerland, Ireland, Austria and Singapore.
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All this started with a US law so he has to comply with. However, instead of those unhelpful comments, he should say that in open software it is unwarranted… not to mention countries can get sanctions for their actions, but not civilians that cannot choose where they are born.
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If we are to believe that Moscow is trying to put something into the kernel “undetected”… gosh, what an organization based on the US with a so pro-establishment leader may be doing so? For real, now I am starting having my doubts on the kernel!
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I’ve worked side by side with RU devs who were both personable and damned competent. Never were their tech skills in doubt, and I retain quite a bit of respect for those individuals.
I’d not do the same today explicitly because of the political and compliance implications. It’s unfortunate, but necessary.
Linux Fundarion is based in America. It needs to follow its rules and politics. I guess a lot of things will happen after this. As something so important for open technology like It , should be based in a more open, mor asvanced in laws and neutral territory.
Linus is from Finland. Not hard to remember reasons for aversion to Russian propaganda for anyone raised near it.
Blanketing the Linux Foundation as American based kind of sounds like you’re a Russian troll.
This is hardly the first time the core Linux code stack has been forked and independently developed. Seems like this is going to invite a Russia-specific development environment that just pulls in updates from the main branch and adds in Russia-internal development (which will likely then be copied by non-Russians and backloaded into the core Linux stack under someone else’s name, because why waste good dev work?)
But the argument appears to be anyone with a Russian-sounding name is getting removed from the core development team, until they can prove to the American team that they aren’t… spooks, I guess? Also
The driver code to which the dropped maintainers contributed remains in place.
So this isn’t such a high security risk that the code is being pulled (presumably because its been vetted and appears beyond repute). This is purely a CYA move to eliminate veterans on the team because they were forthright about their identities.
should be based in a more open, mor asvanced in laws and neutral territory.
Its not clear how a policy of booting people based on their surnames accomplishes this.
I could mention all the forks that Linux currently has, please.
Isn’t most of Linux open source?
All of it is. But its still possible to sneak backdoors into Foss software (though magnitudes harder). See xz.
With that logic, the US contributes should be expelled too. We have more examples of US folks being served NSLs than Russians.
Its an American-based venture, owned and operated by American businessmen. They’re not going to burn their own guys, even if some of them are spooks (no evidence that anyone on the core dev team is a spook, but crazy to think the FSB would have people in and the Five-Eyes guys wouldn’t).
I do wonder how long until we start seeing mainstream code-forks that span geopolitical regions. Will we have a Digital Iron Curtain, with BRICS countries doing their own FOSS branches independently of NATO block?
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.
Did they get paid?
Edit: Very likely they were paid, and that’s where IP addresses end and sanctions begin.
Every worker within an organization has to be paid, somehow.
Somebody must bear the costs of the supposedly “free (gratis).” In the end, nothing is truly free cost. And, not a single person would work for free (no payment, compensation, or benefits, or in other words, gratis) full-time.
It is an absurdity to think otherwise.
Free and open-source software is handed out at zero-cost to make it possible to lower the barrier of entrance; to make it as widely available as possible. Knowledge should, indeed, be free (gratis).
Explain volunteers then.
Where did you get volunteers from?
It’s about people on the maintainers list, and those are paid.
That it’s open software doesn’t mean people are working for free.
Save your sanity and do Settings -> Blocks -> Block instance -> lemmy.ml
Also perhaps block me if you strongly disagree with the above.
Save your sanity and do Settings -> Blocks -> Block instance -> lemmy.ml
I approve this comment.
Yesterday I accidentally commented in .ml and mentioned that voting third party in our current voting system is playing with fire to get a worse candidate in office. I was told I must therefore start a grassroots movement for ranked choice voting, because apparently I can’t have an opinion without a movement.
Normally I let a few downvotes get under my skin more than I care to admit, but in this setting it was kind of a badge of honor. Honestly it was kind of “fun” to see what people were saying.
Please stip blocking people, please stip talking about blocking everyone
Yes, i gettit. Different opinions can be annoying but if we don’t all participate in. A similar environment.we all just disappear in our little echo chamber pillars, unable to hear or understand the others, which leads to more extremist opinions on all sides.
We NEED to hear others, if not just for the fact that others may NEED to hear our voices too.
I honestly this echo chamber crap is squarely caused by the Internet, the tool that promised to bring humanity together, and instead ended up dividing us more than ever because anyone hearing an opinion they don’t like immediately bans that voice. Can’t have anyone disagreeing now!
I get it, there are some stupid opinions out there, dangerous ones too, but the more we ban them, the more they will only be able to talk eachother into extremism and the WILL be back, with more people, and more extremist opinions.
FFS, we need to learn to start listening to each other again. An entire generation has grown up with “if you don’t like to hear that opinion, just have it banned”, and it’s not helpful.
Early Internet was a wild west crazy town for sure, loads of assholes lurking around, but it was better than what we have now, where EVERY space is curated and hawkishly guarded against those that might even look in the wrong direction.
I’ve spent quite some time on right wing subs back in the day in Reddit, discussing whatever topic with hard line conservative right wing types and when you do you find out they are human too, usually with a lot of fears, and you actually get to understand why they feel the way they feel, and you can get them to understand that yeah, maybe it’s not the best solution. You find common ground and got somebody a little closer to the light. Yes, I’m a big fan of that black guy (forgot his name) who goes out to talk to KKK members to convert them away from the KKK.
I know this isn’t for everyone, but a lot of us can and should step up and start talking, start listening. I’m not saying st all you should agree with a neo nazi, but you can listen to him or her, understand where they’re coming from, and have them do the same. Once you both see the humanity in each other you can actually make everyone be a little better.
It’s better than the alternative where the inevitable outcome is that we’ll start having civil wars everywhere and just kill those we oppose.
I’m surprised to find somebody with some sense around here.
I have never used a block or mute feature on any site or any service in all my life. It is wild to me that people today actually use those features, let alone to constrict the ideas that they allow themselves to be exposed to.
I conducted a fun little experiment over at /c/asklemmy@lemmy.world in which I posited the question: “If it were possible, how would you deprogram an extreme conservative?”. I then waited twenty hours before posting “If it were possible, how would you deprogram an extreme progressive?”. The difference in reception between the questions exposed the intense lib-left bias that is pervasive on Lemmy, a byproduct of people constantly walling themselves into self-made echochambers.
improved my lemmy experience ten fold just blocking that instance.
That instance’s mods blocked me this morning lol.
The amount of people simping for Russia in that other thread is insane. Apparently calling Ukraine a country of Nazis is fine, but saying Russia is a dictatorship is not lmao.
If you see a tankie or pro Russia comment, 99% of the time it’s a lemmy.ml poster
Hexgears and of course lemmygrad.ml are of the same kind
😄exactly! Phu, the brain gymnastics that those people are capable of is mind bending 🤣
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Can we see where someone is hosting a Lemmy (domain, insnace, thing?)
I guess, you got to check IP and see what country it belongs to, but if they use a VPS or VPN or both, you can’t really know where the person who manages the instance lives / operates.
Sometimes it is posted on the instance front page or about page.
Some of us are actually normal
Yeah, when I created my Lemmy account I had to choose an instance before knowing anything about Lemmy yet. And .ml seemed like the default one to choose, given https://join-lemmy.org/ told me it is ran by the devs.
Oh well.
I see you, hang in there buddy!
Doesn’t help if the admins think you’re not. Which is why I had to relocate a community because of admin content meddling and instance users shitstorming in a waterglass.
I love it here as well 😁
altlinux devs:
oh come on we are not trollsLinus 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
Linus in 2012: Nvidia fuck you
Linus in 2024: Russia fuck you
He’s not wrong…
He almost never is.
However, it makes me sad that FOSS is being pulled in to these sanctions.
Good
I wouldn’t want to have FSB agents maintaining my open source either.
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)_/¯
Lots of pro-Russia bots in here pretending to be concerned about
their sudden inability to sneak backdoors into the kernelopen source.
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
If it was framed as a measure against possible government coordinated infiltration, sure. But that’s not the case.
thank you Lemmy user ILikeBoobies for your valuable contribution
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.
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.
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?
It’s not that hard of a choice either ofc, given one is essentially required.
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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.
I don’t think this only happens now, governments like Russia, USA, China, Israel will likely always be making these attempts.
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.
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.
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?
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.
SELinux from NSA is evil. Got it.
I don’t think that’s what they were saying, but I don’t think you’re making that point in good faith either.
What are you even trying to say or suggest here?
It is appling the the same standard
- Russia -> FSB -> operated by Russian -> contributing to Linux -> Bad
- USA -> NSA -> operated by Americans -> authored SELinux -> Bad
Should this logic work? Hell no. It’s simply prejudice that against any nationals that they have ill intent of doing something because their country do something bad. Just like a child can’t choose their parents, a citizen can’t choose their nation at born.
The wrench attack argument can be applied to any nationals too, by anyone.
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.
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.
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”.
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)
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!
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?
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.
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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”
So the Rest of the world should trust CIA, NSA contributions but not Russia’s FSB ? come on , opensource should be tolerant towards all espionage agencies no matter their skin color.
This is the difference between political systems where one is really really bad but at least doesn’t regularly assassinate opponents in the most horrific ways, and allow people to speak their minds.
I don’t trust the US any further than I can throw it, but no matter how you look at it, it’s the lesser evil.
Hell, look at sports. If a Russian athlete wins you can pretty much disqualify them for doping without having tested them because they all do it and I feel sorry for them, I feel sorry for that situation. There is a reason (beyond this war) why Russian athletes weren’t allowed to compete at certain events, and it’s the insane amount of doping used by them. I’m sure these athletes don’t want to do this crap, but a state basically forces them to.
I can see the worry about similar issues with developers.
Russians are majority white but ok
don’t be pedantic, what about the Chinese, south-Africans, north-Koreans, Cubans, …etc
No, they don’t.
Replying because I need to think about how I’m going to vote for this comment and plan to come back later.
