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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Couldn't think of a more lemmy thread topic than one involving both Russian geopolitics and linux.
This one is scratching a ton of itch.
Hello Internet commenters. Please remember that there's no rule that says you need to tell us all your gut reaction to this if you know absolutely nothing about the situation.
knowing nothing about the situation is indeed the problem. if only this process was more transparent...
Dude, WHAT. This is totally against what Linux and Open source in general stand for.
I don't support the thing that I'm sure was their reason for this but I definitely don't support banning someone from contributing to an open system solely off nationality.
So what eventually only the "good guys" can contribute to and use open source software? Who exactly decides who the "good guys" are in this scenario? USA? China?
The implications of what this can cause in the future for potentially all of the open source community is absolutely sad. We should welcome all our fellow human beings to contributing to open source.
Reminds me of a comment the other day on a post about Ventoy. Whatever the situation there is, which definitely needs clarification still, the person was saying that you shouldn't trust it at all because the maintainer is Chinese, even though he has emigrated away. Because the CCP will be able to leverage his family still there to force him to create a backdoor.
That's just thinly veiled racism in my opinion.
That's plain racism honestly.
I knew a (asian) guy who was working for a government contractor serving the US military. The racism is very serious to say the least. He got framed when something went down and was almost tied with treason. (that carries the death penalty) The authorities hit him with questions about his loyalty to the US for 5 hours even though he grew up in the US and so did his parents.
As far as I can read from that, they're still maintainers, just have had their credit removed from the contributors page, no?
Still a strange thing to do and I look forwards to an explanation.
"Compliance requirements"? The kernel's american now?! WTF?
The commonality of all these maintainers being dropped? They appear to all be Russian or associated with Russia. Most of them with .ru email addresses.
Not short-sighted in the least...
Similarly, the driver code remains within the kernel -- including for Russian hardware such as around the Baikal CPUs from Russia's Baikal Electronics.
Not a hypocrite move at all...
Are israeli developers blocked as well? How about all american developers considering how the US foreign policy keeps fucking everyone up all over the place in the name of liberty and freedom... of oil?
I am quite disappointed at the lack of transparency regarding this.
it's a pity that politics is penetrating more and more into open source and FOSS.
recently support for Russian cloud providers was cut out of opentofu. https://github.com/opentofu/registry/pull/824
now this. this is, of course, natural the core and many components of modern distributions have not been free in terms of decision-making for a long time and are under the influence of large companies, which in turn are under the influence of the USA.
It's a fact of life that politics permeates everything, nothing is in isolation of the political climate it exists within.
The state of the world today is a function of the politics that got us here, a big change in world politics can have dramatic and far reaching effects.
A healthy global FOSS culture requires collaborative politics to be the flavour of the day—which is unfortunately not the case in a lot of countries currently.
This is a shame, I always thought Linux was supposed to be an International collaboration, hate to see it caught up in this bullshit political agenda.
Political agenda is a funny euphemism for imperialist invasion and genocide.
I think the Russians that would want to backdoor stuff would just use a name like John.
I'm definitely all for Ukraine winning, but this is bullshit, basically the red scare all over again (but for tech).
red scare all over again
It never stopped. Most people still think Russia's communist. Or any country that calls themselves as such.
This is dumb. Corporate divestment, sure, of course, fuck their money and their power structures. But open-source developers are not generally gung-ho about the war effort... let alone propping up their local military-industrial complex.
Gotta have them "various compliance requirements", man, gotta have'em. Don't ask me what they are, but damnit, gotta have'em.
Now what the actual fuck
Linus gives it a full green light and refers to negative reactions as Russian bot attacks
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linus-Torvalds-Russian-Devs
My first thought is that this was to make Linux palatable to western regulations, like how companies can't use Kaspersky anymore. Stupid if I'm right because it's not like the fsb is going to sneak spyware into Linux.
Edit: Linus commented on this and I was right: https://lemmy.world/comment/13034386
They very well could. However, it also could come from some US intelligence agency as well.
For me as an old fart this all sounds like such a stupid thing... who cares if someone who volunteer to work for an software project is a Russian, German, Iranian or - God forbid - an Frenchman. My personal - and of course completely insignificant - opinion is that politics should stay out.
only.