Comment on Linus Torvalds affirms expulsion of Russian maintainers

• sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  a human is entirely defined by their country of origin

  That’s missing a big part of the justification here. When you’re from a given country, that country frequently has a lot of influence over you. You probably have family and other ties in your home country, and those can be used as leverage to get you to do what the state wants. And when your country is in active opposition to a large portion of the free world, it makes a lot of sense for people to be extra cautious in who they deal with, because it’s never clear if that person is being manipulated by their former state.

  So excluding someone based on nationality can absolutely make sense as an easy rule of thumb to avoid most of the problems stemming from that state.

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  • DrDystopia@lemy.lol ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Would you agree it’s a good thing to avoid US software as they’ve incorporated secret surveillance into law through letters of national security to private companies?

    And by extension, perhaps even shunning US citizens?

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    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      As a US citizen, I care less about where the software comes from, but who hosts that software, so I tend to use FOSS products and services, preferring to self-host where it’s not too annoying.

      I don’t think anyone should shun citizens from any country, but we should be wary of trusting citizens from countries where the government has a larger influence. So we should be hesitant to trust people from Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran (and a bunch of others, I’m just listing the official enemies of the US), especially if they still live in those countries. That doesn’t mean we should shun people from those countries (I have an awesome coworker from Iran), just that we should hesitate to put them into influential positions. I have no problem collaborating with people from any of those countries, I just think we should be a little extra careful when there’s a stronger incentive for their government to get involved (and manipulating Linux is attractive for pretty much every government, esp. my own).

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      • rolling_resistance@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        I have no problem collaborating with people from any of those countries we should hesitate to put them into influential positions

        “I’m an American, and therefore I’m better”

        where the government has a larger influence

        We’re literally talking about Linux Foundation making these changes to comply with requirements of your government.

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  • rolling_resistance@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Should we exclude people from states actively fueling a genocide?

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    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      That’s completely unrelated to contribution to FOSS. The only way it would be relevant is for software projects that do some kind of filtering, so something like Lemmy might be an area where I’d hesitate to put someone from Israel, Gaza, Russia, or Ukraine into a maintainer/moderator/admin role because they could influence what content is viewed by users in a way that paints their country in a better light.

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      • rolling_resistance@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        But the US is fine?

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• Poxlox@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Have you even read the policy? “The people removed from maintainer positions were identified as employed by companies on the US and EU sanctions list. These companies are directly involved in the Russian military complex and therefore are directly complicit in war crimes being committed daily in Ukraine”. Racist? My ass.

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  • unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    This is not about the removed maintainers. Its about this comment section.

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• spookex@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Because as long as the Russian state exists and can point to their “history” as an empire and use it as an excuse to take over their neighboring countries (like Latvia, the place where I’m from), I won’t be satisfied.

  Unfortunately the nobody bombing Moscow yet, so anything that isolates and makes the population more angry and can hopefully topple the government is a good thing in my book

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• LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Yeah. Times like this I wonder whether a better world is even really possible, or whether social liberalisation was but a blip on a trajectory of bigotry, antagonism, tribalism and savagery.

  Even in harmless contexts, the commodification of national identity as the first and foremost trait of a person even for the purposes of smalltalk or jest always makes me think if perhaps most are far more nationalist than they’d care to admit or even themselves think. It’s a haunting thought.

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