Comment on Linus Torvalds affirms expulsion of Russian maintainers
FangedWyvern42@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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.
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.
Do you also know Finland is next to russia and it does not have to be US influence for someone like Linus to know Russian gov can pressure developers? This change removes code commit not the contribution rights.
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?
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
It’s not that hard of a choice either ofc, given one is essentially required.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
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.
SuperIce@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Russians aren’t restricted from getting their changes submitted, they just can’t be maintainers. This means that they need another maintainer to approve their changes, just like if you or me were to submit a change. A lot of people seem to be misunderstanding what actually happened.
aidan@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I actually just emailed RMS about this and I’m genuinely curious what he says. If anyone else is interested, I’ll ask if he’s fine with me sharing some of the response.
TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Just what we need. The opinions of someone who thinks having sex with children is a good thing.
aidan@lemmy.world 1 year ago
He never said that. I agree he was more skeptical than I’d like, but he eventually was informed and apologized.
guemax@feddit.org 1 year ago
Oh yes, an update would be really interesting! (Even though I agree with @sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works in all points.)
My opinion on this whole topic: I don’t like the decision, a Free Software project should only prevent people from contributing in very rare occasions (e.g. having actively tried to sabotage the project). I don’t think this was the case, because I presume that the Linux Foundation was forced by the U.S. government to kick the maintainers out. The should’ve also communicated more clearly to prevent the confusion. (Russian trolls will cry out no matter how they phrased that.)