He didn't expel all Russians, just the ones working for sanctioned Russian companies.
Important context and a good decision
That would've been great for them to clarify earlier XD
That would've generated fewer clicks. Sensationalism is always more profitable.
Good! So why the incendiary comments Linus made on Russians. It is so hard to say something like this: "I have to expel them from the project due to a US law forced us to do it. However, I had trust on them all these years and they contributed a lot to the project (that is why they were working here). Now, I am against the law because we should not discriminate people for the origin. Moreover, the claim that they can harm the software is unwarranted because it is OPEN and many eyes are on it. Finally, this harms the entire Linux project because now makes it an "American"project rather than an global one. Sad times."
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.
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.
Linus is from Finland. Finns barely tolerate Russians under usual circumstances. These are not usual circumstances.
Absolutely based as fuck as usual.
Good cleanup on the security vulnerabilities!
To directly quote Linus:
Ok, lots of Russian trolls out and about.
It's entirely clear why the change was done, it's not getting reverted, and using multiple random anonymous accounts to try to "grass root" it by Russian troll factories isn't going to change anything.
And FYI for the actual innocent bystanders who aren't troll farm accounts - the "various compliance requirements" are not just a US thing.
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.
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.
It's really awesome to expel by nationality, even including people who've long moved out and immigrated years ago and don't support the invasion and war waged on Ukraine /s
Honestly fuck Russia ofc, but this goes a bit too far into the grey area between hawkish-reasonable and discriminatory, and on the latter side I'm not sure who and/or what this is meant to help, nor does it seem particularly fair to those individual contributors to keep their code yet remove attribution and mailing list entries.
EDIT: holy shit the bloodlust in the comments here is actually unreal, even on arr slash neoliberal and the politics communities here on lemmy the comments are way more sane.
Why are people so fundamentally incapable of nuanced judgement. According to people in this comment section, a human is entirely defined by their country of origin. What is this witch hunt level, toddler IQ thinking. Are people really so desperate to have a "bad guy" that they can blame everything on? This dehumanization of people is wild to me.
a human is entirely defined by their country of origin
This reeks of Americanism, yanks are absurdly obsessed with race and nationality
The irony of your comment is not lost on me.
But yeah if you were to measure a country by its loudest voices then that would be accurate.
It's disappointing behavior by Linus. It's understandable that sanctions could force the removal of people just for being Russia.
His reply however shows he personally is in favor of removing people just for being Russian.
I wonder if any of the people who pressured him to take some time off for being a "jerk" will give a shit for this response.
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.
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.
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 kernel~~open source.
I wouldn't want to have FSB agents maintaining my open source either.
Do China next
And Israel
No changes until China decides to invade Taiwan and the sanctions that Russia currently has begin.
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.
I don't understand the benefit in doing this.
Security. Torvalds did this for security.
Is it really that hard to parse?
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
Just goes to show that even a legend can act like an idiot.
Like not risking his lifelyhood to fight US and EU sanctions against a genocidal regime?
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.
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