Linus Torvalds affirms expulsion of Russian maintainers

Status
Not open for further replies.
It's funny. I was reading an article a year ago about Russian distros like Astra which criticized that Russians are only the fourth in the control chain and that they need a truly independent OS. But that requires hardware control at least. I believe in the long run decisions like these will bite the West in the rear. Russians are building their own lithography equipment now. Sure, they have to catch up several years or even decades. But it will be much easier to do so in building their own software.
 
Maybe I didn't make my point clear enough. We know about some of the "cyber war" actions russian government is involved with. We know it's a serious threat, especially regarding open-source projects that are crucial for lots of our infrastructure. I'm totally with e.g. kpedersen that geopolitical situations, even as horrible as an actual ongoing war, should – as far as ever possible – not affect other areas of cooperation like e.g. science. Still you have to do something about the much increased threat level.

In software development, you could mitigate such threats e.g. with strict governance rules, like obligatory and thorough code reviews. That's actually a bit more challenging to do in an open-source project with a huge amount of volunteer developers. A "maintainer" in such a large project is typically in a key position to approve some code without anyone else ever having a deeper look. Now saying "for now, we don't want russians in maintainer positions" is still a horrible thing (you judge the person by some "random" property), but nevertheless it is a way to manage the risk. As was already stated, this doesn't prevent those people from contributing, it just enforces someone else will review everything they contribute.

Leaves the crap Linus wrote. I mean, did anyone ever expect Linus would be capable of communicating such a hard and controversial decision in a professional and considerate way? I certainly didn't. Of course he will follow his typical stupid patterns...
 
zirias@ said:
A "maintainer" in such a large project is typically in a key position to approve some code without anyone else ever having a deeper look.
Click to expand...
A maintainer is usually someone who understands the piece of software best. Good luck with the new maintainers and I hope that those Russians throw the towel and go to other projects where russophobia is not the norm. Btw. your security and geopolitical arguments are garbage too, pure hypocrisy
 
This was one of the reasons I stopped using Linux. It's not the embargo but the demonization of individuals based on nationality that is the issue. The fact of governmental restriction is unfortunate but does not mean that Russian contributors are to be vilified unjustly. That is an error that will be unrecoverable.
 
Cthulhux said:
How so?
Click to expand...
If you check out the Linux Foundation website, you will notice that so many of these projects are to incubate corporate support. They have almost nothing to do with raising funds for Linux development directly.

Certainly this is a *viable* approach to get money for Linux development (by making Linux appeal as a solution for corporations) but then I certainly don't think I am out of line by calling it out as such. At the end of the day, prostitution also yields money.

Contrast this to the FreeBSD foundation (which yes, is being swayed / managed by iX and Klara) but most projects on there are directly on point for FreeBSD development. Simply a different approach. Luckily it just means it is a little more disconnected from what dealing with a large proportion of companies require (adhering to sanctions, etc).

zirias@ said:
but nevertheless it is a way to manage the risk. As was already stated, this doesn't prevent those people from contributing, it just enforces someone else will review everything they contribute.
Click to expand...
Indeed. If them not being "official" maintainers also mitigates the sanction excuse, then so be it. Linus should basically have presented this solution in a less sensational and inflamatory manner. In the past, his actions have generally resonated well with me but I feel he dropped the ball on this one. He *is* in a position of power and so he does need to get better at managing us "pebs" to prevent the witch hunts, crusades and other degrading things that mobs (and troops of monkeys) do. He has failed to protect us from the following:

<badly_translated_roman_proverb>
The backsides of humans will become sore as we need to reach deeper and deeper inside ourselves for more poop to throw at one another.
</badly_translated_roman_proverb>
 
fmc000 said:
As a newcomer I don't know what/who an "odd contractor" is. Care to explain? Thanks in advance.
Click to expand...

The FreeBSD foundation directly contracts out committers for specific projects. At this time for wifi and the laptop projects (sound etc). So I think they would be unable to do that with Russian nationals at this time since the Foundation is US based.
 
Crivens said:
On a personal level his actions are justified.
Click to expand...
On a personal level he is simply a fascist.

If you think fascism is justified, I wonder why. And let me be very clear about that: My ancestors were Jews. Many of them were hunted, suppressed and killed by the nazi dictatorship. Our generation has sworn to never again let such happen: never again fascism, never again war.
This pledge is more relevant and more imminent than any computer crap or any google-positivism called "professionalism", because it concerns our primary human rights. It is our obligation to stand up and speak up against such.

Nowadays half the world seems to think that they only need to replace Jews by Russians, and then fight an unjust war against Russia instead of Poland, in order to permute from fascists to anti-fascists. This is not the case.
Also, discussing administrative repression and discrimination against Russia and calling that "professional" is very muchl the same as discussing NS racial biology as a science and calling that professional. It is not acceptable - it continues to be simple and blatant fascism.

kpedersen said:
But perhaps short term all of those skilled developers who were unlucky enough to be born in a certain country will now come and fix some of the shortcomings in FreeBSD ;)
Click to expand...
Would You please mind to think at least more than five minutes before your nose-tip?

Thi issue is not going to resolve without understanding the root-cause. The US establishment have already exploited and plundered almost all races on the world (negroes, indians, chinese, african, east-asian, south american, etc.etc.). In order to sustain their cannibalism economy, they have no other option than to exploit eastern Europe and subdue Russia - because everything else has already been used up.

Those powers which obviousely are capable of controlling the staffing of Linux, can just as well take a dislike in the racial uncleanliness of FreeBSD developers, with very much the same consequences.
 
kpedersen said:
Contrast this to the FreeBSD foundation (which yes, is being swayed / managed by iX and Klara) but most projects on there are directly on point for FreeBSD development. Simply a different approach. Luckily it just means it is a little more disconnected from what dealing with a large proportion of companies require (adhering to sanctions, etc).
Click to expand...

That is a matter of mere mass accretion and time.

Back, once upon a time, the so-called foundation was intended simply as an abstract legal entity that can sign license contracts in such cases where that is required (e.g. Java), and nothing more.
Now it is something entirely different, as everybody appears to look at that foundation as the actual governing body making all decisions.

Changing the actual direction of that governing is only a minor change, compared with the past development, and will probably happen as need may be perveiced.
 
fmc000 said:
Indeed but The Linux Foundation, IBM, Red Hat, Microsoft, Google, Meta are among the biggest Linux contributors and all of them are based in the US. All of them are historically leaning towards the US Democrats / left wing side of things, so jb82 comment has some merit IMHO.
Click to expand...
Yes, that one is very interesting.

For a long time I was thinking that the Internet as such would finally resolve the core communist issue. Because on the Internet every member can be server and client at the same time, so there is no longer an implicit class distinction between senders and receivers, workers and employers.

However, the same old structure of capitalism did then reappear, apparently out-of-itself: companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, offering things of little technological value, but doing so at scale and monopolizing the users.
Looking closer, I figured that practically all of these companies were founded by an individual person each, who happened to be a student of a private american elite-university.
#
The political stance of these is probably just consequencial.
 
PMc said:
That is a matter of mere mass accretion and time.
Click to expand...
Absolutely and I can see slight hints of this already. For one I think it is mad that the foundation website is better maintained than the project website itself. There are also some announcements and project ideas which are just pipedreams but look good on pitch decks. "Foundations" tend to be where projects crack once they can see a few bucks.

But luckily as a whole, the corruption has not happened yet :)
 
AFAIK, the people who were booted off the Maintainers'-circle were directly employed by what could be described as the "Russian MIC".

I can understand why that happened, had to happen (OFAC's SDN etc.pp.) and that I get that Linus is somewhat worked up about this whole thing because it literally hits "close to home".

But at the same time, it opens a pandora's box that ultimately isn't very good for Open Source Software as a whole: the exclusion of a potentially large number of developers from nations not 100% aligned with US interests.
 
There's not enough information from Linus to even make useful discussion. Team authorized to make decisions made decisions. Bla bla bla fascist. Yeah, we throw around terms in open source like BDFL, it's similar but not the same. The only "law" here is the license and who owns trademarks. You're free to take the source and do something different.

Would be more interesting if we knew what the lawyers told them.
 
Yes. You'd think there's a statement on the Linux Foundation website that clarifies their position.
Unless, of course, everybody in Linux Kernel Land serves at the discretion of Linus and only Linus.
 
rainer_d said:
Yes. You'd think there's a statement on the Linux Foundation website that clarifies their position.
Unless, of course, everybody in Linux Kernel Land serves at the discretion of Linus and only Linus.
Click to expand...

As far as I understand the Linux governing model the latter is actually the case.

Everybody has the right to split the project of course.
 
I don't understand (or want to care so much, I guess--ignorance is bliss) the political aspect(s) but this thread is sort of depressing in that BSD devs are sort of on a pedestal in my book and I'm reading about "foundation driving this/that" is a bit of a taste of "real life". I'm just going to go back to my thoughts that it works like:

"I'm BSD. Hey, I'm an engineer and it would be cool if XYZ ... let me just use my super-foo-brain and code this up in three lines ... *boom goes the awesome*"
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top