Russia Mulls Forking Linux in Response to Developer Exclusions
Russia Mulls Forking Linux in Response to Developer Exclusions
Russia plans to establish an independent Linux development community after the removal of Russian contributors from Linux kernel development.
personally i don't agree with sanctioning foss communities.
but fuckit, bring on more forks i say.
among other benefits, the scifi-type scenario of nations trying to patch eachothers backdoors and slip in new backdoors (and hopefully innovations). could make for an exciting OS space-race type scenario
personally i don't agree with sanctioning foss communities.
Foss communities aren't being sanctioned. Whole countries are. It's the same limitation whatever enterprise you're in.
If Olympians have to renounce their country to take part in global competition, why do you not think a software developer wouldn't have to do the same to be involved in a global project?
this is a complex topic and probably belongs in a different thread.
essentially i don't personally believe in punishing citizens of a country for the actions of its politicians.
at best its misguided, at worse it basically empowers politicians on both sides who draw power from friction between citizens of different nations. typical divide and conquer bs.
why do you not think a software developer wouldnât have to
wouldn't or shouldn't? if you mean wouldn't, it's not surprising and its not the dev's fault they have to comply with policy, so the criticism is not with them.
if you mean shouldn't, i don't agree with punishing athletes either, but regarding foss specifically, isn't the "friendly competition" of olympics equivalent to that? sort of. in some ways yes. in other ways its actually the opposite.
collaboration is actually the opposite of competition.
and while there's a case for the benefits of healthy sports competition, i don't believe it truly fulfills the spirit of international goodwill to the degree it says on the packaging. foss and other forms of international collaboration for the betterment of greater society are definitely on a higher rung - in my opinion at least.
Probably better for BRICS countries to consider contributing to something different.
Realistically there's no feasible way for the US to block access to use the kernel, and even a soft fork of it will be laughably easy for glowies to exploit. There are a bunch of promising kernels that could be well suited for China and Russia's push towards RISC and ARM independence, whereas in Linux they'd be tasked with maintaining drivers and other systems that are a massive security vulnerability if you don't have total control over them.
I'd honestly even consider it a good idea for Russia to get the FSF to fight this considering it's a blatant violation of the GPL. Even if the president can just say whatever they like, at least you can make it embarrassing and expensive for the chauvinists gloating at the labour they exploited for years.
I'd honestly even consider it a good idea for Russia to get the FSF to fight this considering it's a blatant violation of the GPL.
How is telling someone that you wonât accept their contributions anymore a violation of the GPL?
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It doesnât. Russians are still free to use and contribute to Linux development. Just a few people lost their maintainer rights.
No point in contributing to a hostile organization.
Russians are still free to use and contribute to Linux development. Just a few people lost their maintainer rights.
Yeah... Russians lost rights. A bit of a catch-22 there, pal.
Right? Itâs weird how so many people upset about the situation in this thread are incapable of explaining why itâs a problem without lying.
Like, I get that it sucks to be removed as a maintainer because of something outside your control. But being, or continuing to be, a maintainer of a project isnât a right thatâs integral to that project being free.
@uiiiq @JustMarkov It's amazing how many people are performatively pretending to not understand this. A handful of specific, named individuals who work for specific companies on the sanctions list are no longer allowed to be maintainers.
Being angry at Linus's wording might be understandable (I rather thought it bang on) but much of the outrage is bizarre, looking a lot like advocacy for ignoring legal obligations, or sometimes like outright opposition to sanctioning Russia.
Please don't...
Can we organize and force the Linux Foundation and/or OFAC to exclude open source software from these sanctions? Is anyone doing that yet?
What would be the point of the sanctions then? If the Linux Foundation were against it they could move the infrastructure to an other jurisdiction which does not sanctize countries, that would carry a strong message. But if they refuse to do that, what's wrong with others' forking it and doing it? That's the point of opensource.
Lol! Why should software get an exception over any other industry?
Even this top level comment is so blatantly misunderstanding the concept of open source software that no one will bother engaging with it properly.
Americans should vote for Trump, he's the best chance to overturn these ludicrous sanctions.
No.
I get where you're coming from... but no. Forking linux is way less dangerous for the world than Trump in the White House.
It'll be called BRICS Linux.
its quality will not be lower than usa linux, as they will pull latest development but not push back (to the linux list)
The fork has no hope of survival. Are you telling me Russia's Ministry of Digital Development can maintain a project of this size? lol, rofl even.
The enemy is both weak and strong.
They can pull patches from mainstream Linux if they can't keep up themselves. The project is big but not too big.
Disregarding the parent comment, but hosting a soft fork is easy enough but it'll quickly become a spaghetti mess of local patches that conflict with upstream changes. It's not like there's an argument for preserving access to Russia either since the nature of the kernel being hosted across torrent trackers makes it impossible to deny Linux to any one country.
It seems like the better solution (imo) is to work on a different kernel receptive of these maintainers, so that the companies employing them can still have a kernel that is developed for their use-cases whilst supporting projects that don't so openly collaborate with hostile states.
Why wouldn't they be able to. Russia has a lot of tech talent, and tends to top programming competitions. Also, if this happened I imagine other countries like China would collaborate as well. China alone has a bigger population than all of the west, and a better education system to boot.
No, but they can host the infrastructure so that excluded developers (the ones that just so happen to be Russian) along with whomever will want (BRICS developers for instance) can surely contribute.