this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2024

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Phoronix: Several Linux Kernel Driver Maintainers Removed Due To Their Association To Russia (www.phoronix.com)

submitted 14 hours ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

"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?

[–] [email protected] 26 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 43 minutes ago

We had a time of peace everyone was dependent on each other. Now the world is fragmenting and we we’ll probably have war or at least high tension between the parties.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 hours ago

Politics is not just the relationship between two people, it's the relationship between a person and everyone/everything else in the world.

Reducto ad absurdum: would you suggest a world where every country is at war with everyone else would foster a better environment for global FOSS collaboration than one where the world was at complete peace?

I honestly thought the statement you quoted was entirely uncontroversial. "Healthy" and "global" being the key words, I'm not saying it's a requirement for FOSS to exist in general or anything.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 hours ago

@0x0 @9point6 That's my take and the universal betterment of mankind that results will bring people closer together. You might even realize someone not sharing your viewpoint is just as human.

[–] [email protected] 55 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (9 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 4 hours ago (7 children)

Yeah, being from Russia is a lot different from being associated with the Russian government. If the maintainers are in the latter, then yeah fuck em, but if they live in Russia with no realistic way of getting out and they’re just trying to live a normal life removed from the bullshit and write code as an intellectual escape? And you take that away from them? Precisely how you radicalize people

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 hours ago

Yeah, being from Russia is a lot different from being associated with the Russian government.

Lies! You're a communist! Russian troll!

/s for the obtuse

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 8 hours ago (3 children)

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.

[–] possiblylinux127 18 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 hours ago

Wasn't that XZ Utils backdoor recently with state ties or am I just remembering wrong

[–] possiblylinux127 20 points 7 hours ago

They very well could. However, it also could come from some US intelligence agency as well.

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