Phoronix: Several Linux Kernel Driver Maintainers Removed Due To Their Association To Russia

Yes there are, I think you guys should block .ML and enjoy your botted shithole website. Better your feed be an obvious echo chamber full of hate.

Being Russian => banned from doing business with the rest of the world

That's pretty straight forward to me.

The problem is they aren't even saying what those requirements are even after numerous inquiries about it.

Don't you think its wrong to ban someone only because of their nationality? I mean for real man. Every country in the world has done some fucked up shit but open source software is supposed to go beyond politics and ideologies.

They weren't doing anything malicious it was wrong to remove them.

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 tried 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.

They employ Torvalds, Torvalds owns Linux™. Who owns the code?

Which law under which jurisdiction?

The open source / FOSS movement in China is pretty rad. I use a sweet all platform text editor maintained by Chinese devs only.

People should be more wary of the control universities, NGOs, finance through those, law enforcement infiltration etc from US, Euros, Japan, South Korea, Aus has over open source projects due to technology being such a high national security priority.

Guess we're just going to be racist and run with the misdirection of criticism of US laws on to foreign enemies. Just go with the flow, I guess.

If they really want reverse brain drain it isn't my problem, it's their long term problem. CERN is also making a dumb mistake, all universities are in on this, it's imperial chauvinism.

I wouldn't be surprised if they did something similar for China at some point. (If tensions worsen)

I don't see them doing anything outside of that

@secret300 The project to discover elements 119 and 120 which previously were a US/Russia collaboration also put on hold. All of humanity moves backwards when we fight, nothing is gained.

Banning CFCs went pretty well too

You know that Russia wasn't able to compete in the Olympics or Paralympics this year, right? The individual athletes weren't banned however, but they had to compete under a neutral banner and weren't in the parade of nations.

Edit: I should have added, was disgusted because Israel were allowed to compete. Huge double standard there.

this is the genocide you must be referring to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHWHqj8g7Bk

Gee i'm glad israeli maintainers are being blocked as well.

I totally think them invading Ukraine is fucked up too but I also think the Israel situation is messed up too and would you be against someone maintaining code just because they are from Israel?

That would be wrong. Linux is supposed to be about more than political alignments its supposed to be a collaborative effort its always been about that.

This is wrong and its super wrong they don't tell anyone what compliance they are following or who issued it to them which is also supposed to be against what open source is about.

@Midnight If Russia were the only one involved, and if weren't provoked by outside powers like say, oh, the United States, yea I could agree with you but my knowledge of history precludes my accepting that explanation.

@theunknownmuncher The US has been involved in probably 300 regime changes throughout the world, has invaded many countries, including those that we were not affiliated with. Russia invades a neighboring country when we install a leader that is going to allow us to put missiles on their border. I really hate to see political hegemony get in the way of a good collaborative effort, we all suffer for it if we allow this.

You do realize that the US has invaded far more countries than Russia has, do burgerlanders have no self awareness at all?

Aside from the fact that it's pretty insane to suggest to kick someone off a project for no reason other than their nationality (the article doesn't say any of these maintainers supported the invasion or had any ties with the government), even if these people actively supported the government, as far as kernel development is concerned... I don't really care? If their contributions are good then I want their patches to be merged. Tor was made by the US government, which I in no way condone, but I still use Tor.

I'm sure removing these maintainers would be of great help to the Ukrainian war effort...

More seriously: We need to help Ukraine more. But this doesn't do that. It just hurts a bunch of people (both the maintainers, and the people using their code) for no benefit whatsoever.

Ehh they keep saying we are not involved we are not whatever. You can only say that so long. I mean the soldiers are coming from somewhere these are not people grown in vats.

No matter how many times Western states and corporate media insist that it wasn’t provoked won’t change the fact that it was[1][2].

A healthy global FOSS culture requires collaborative politics to be the flavour of the day

Bullshit. There's no reason people with political differences can't collaborate on the same project, unless those differences are really huge.

Well for what its worth there are other counties outside of Russia

Agree with the former, not the latter.

MKTux

What was this alleged time of peace you speak of?

To be honest, the only reason why any of that appeared to be true, or the west appeared to uphold free speech, just like free trade policies and laissez faire approach to international finance, that was all just because Wall St did not feel threatened, that was all just because the propaganda was received unthinkingly for the past 30 years or so. Especially between 2001 and the first part of the financial crash.

Mine?

he's just an American nationalist at heart. his dad was a member of the Russian communist party and his biography seemed to make clear that rebelled from that.

socially he's not terrible but when the war drums come beating he's stepping in line for the stars and stripes

I understand that.

But he also sits at the heart of the open-source community, and his actions might ripple through the entire sector. With this much influence, allowing your personal fears to chime in is unacceptable.

Once we start fragmenting open-source the way we fragment everything else, we lose the very spirit of it and open doors to so much potential power abuse.

Besides, I really don't see how restricting Russian maintainers would prevent Russian military aggression. If something important there is powered by Linux, it can be forked and modified to serve a specific need. Not to mention Finland is now part of NATO.

Russia might invade Finland.

Finland's part or NATO now. Putin may be a lot of things, stupid ain't one of them. Ironically, this kinda backfired on him but can't say it was unexpected considering most scandinavians love the american dream.

Sure but they are not a democracy.

There is a hot war going on and the US is using sanctions to isolate Russia from using western technology to continue their genocide. That goes a little beyond "nationalistic ideas". Russia is being isolated for their actions and this was past due. It sucks for the Russian maintainers, but under the heading of "war is hell" this is a minor inconvenience.

Not sure if being against Russian aggression can be called a "political belief" as nearly all Finns pretty much agree on it.

No one knows yet. Given the scale of the operation it's most likely a large organization.

Possibly, but that's a much smaller project being run by 1 guy. Linux has a lot more people and reviews involved.

But where do you have information that it was russian state? There are many state actors capable of doing this. Just saying

it isn't like Americans would do that, right?

Even Wikipedia, which is a shockingly bloodthirsty pro-NATO outlet, admits there is zero proof that a "Russian state actor" did this, there are just "western security experts" claiming it (as usual), and opinion is divided.

Did you even read this or do you just vaguely remember a Wired article? I have been able to see through these obvious ploys since I was a teenager reading about cold war propaganda (okay that was like 5 years ago but still SMDH)

Great sign for discussion that hacking is still being treated by Redditors as Russian, Chinese, and North Korean until proven otherwise. 🤕

What I see is that someone is arguing the point that all Russians are criminals. If someone is sending bad code, they usually just get banned, this time it's preventive measures based on ethnicity.

So I think good luck for foss movement. Hopefully, forking that project won't be illegal because otherwise foss will die

Same here! I've been eyeing OpenBSD for quite some time now.

is bsd safe from this? where is their foundation based?

exactly, can't forget about good old racism

Nonsense personal attack