Maybe not Putin personally, but it’s an autocracy. If/when the Russian government comes knocking on their door and tells them that they need to do x, y, and z with the kernel, otherwise they will mysteriously fall from a high window (an extremely credible threat these days), what do you think they’ll do? What do you think you would do?
Sucks for the majority of Russian developers that want to participate in the FOSS community, but I get it. It is a national security issue.
This is kind of how sanctions are meant to work. We could have a discussion about whether or not sanctions should be used as it is sort of a form of collective punishment, but that’s a separate argument.
They want regular Russians to “feel it,” so that there is more pressure from the populace to get them to stop doing the shit they were sanctioned over. Obviously, in an autocracy, it’s much easier to just ignore and suppress dissent. But, generally, the idea is to make everybody feel the consequences for invading a sovereign nation.
Dunno. But this post is about Linus Torwalds booting Russians from an open source project due to their association with a warmongering regime. It’s nothing to do with the US.
Arguably, ITAR set the precedent in the 1990’s during the crypto wars. USians used to have to travel to Canada to work on cryptographic code in OpenBSD because their commits couldn’t legally be exported.
We’re gonna start seeing large open source communities start to break into smaller ones because of sanctions from now aren’t we?
This sets such a bad precedent…
The bad precedent was starting a war
Yeah I’m sure the maintainers are in talks with Putin directly
Maybe not Putin personally, but it’s an autocracy. If/when the Russian government comes knocking on their door and tells them that they need to do x, y, and z with the kernel, otherwise they will mysteriously fall from a high window (an extremely credible threat these days), what do you think they’ll do? What do you think you would do?
Sucks for the majority of Russian developers that want to participate in the FOSS community, but I get it. It is a national security issue.
This is kind of how sanctions are meant to work. We could have a discussion about whether or not sanctions should be used as it is sort of a form of collective punishment, but that’s a separate argument.
They want regular Russians to “feel it,” so that there is more pressure from the populace to get them to stop doing the shit they were sanctioned over. Obviously, in an autocracy, it’s much easier to just ignore and suppress dissent. But, generally, the idea is to make everybody feel the consequences for invading a sovereign nation.
CIA could do that too.
Ah yes. The Finnish CIA.
They have one?
Dunno. But this post is about Linus Torwalds booting Russians from an open source project due to their association with a warmongering regime. It’s nothing to do with the US.
Any moderator want to actually let me know why my comment was removed, or…?
Is pointing out the dangers of working in an autocratic nation against the rules?
Arguably, ITAR set the precedent in the 1990’s during the crypto wars. USians used to have to travel to Canada to work on cryptographic code in OpenBSD because their commits couldn’t legally be exported.
This article gives a good discussion about a potential coming East/West political split in the world of FOSS.
https://thenewstack.io/avoiding-a-geopolitical-open-source-apocalypse/