Couldn’t think of a more lemmy thread topic than one involving both Russian geopolitics and linux.
Couldn’t think of a more lemmy thread topic than one involving both Russian geopolitics and linux.
part of me is sad that there aren’t many .worlders defending blocking those evil tankies. lol
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.
you’re preaching to the choir here; my fault for not including the sarcasm/snark tag.
Lmao sarcasm is indistinguishable from the full on brigading from the “help tankies are brigading us” instances going on in here to me 😅
friendly fire is common on the lemmyverse and i think it’s because of the reddit liberals; they’ve managed to get almost every single reddit refugee to self sort into a few instances to protect their delicate sensibilities so they’re incredibly well organized and funded, or they’re EXTREMELY dedicated individuals to the point of doing it full time for free.
Kernel development is for
only.“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?
The kernel’s american now?! WTF?
Now we see the intended outcome of the “Inclusively” movement of the past few years.
I can’t wait to see this “Inclusively” extended to China, India, Brazil and others.
We’ll truly be the most Inclusive ever!!! What a great thing!!!
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.
Fantastic to hear! wonderful news. Racists and Xenophobes will try to stop global collaboration, but the real conflict that matters will always be the smart vs the lowiq. FOSS is about humanity first and not any particular sub-category. Everyone who gets in the way is trying to divide and stop FOSS from saving the planet.
I think at the moment FOSS movement has a core of libertarian idealism which historically cleaves to the west when anything is on the line. This is because of academic institutions being dependent on/greedy for financial and political backing, and the control of the time economy of workers by tech corps trying to turn open source into “mow my lawn for free, build character” or by the media platforms which popularizers/online tutors of open source tech and software and operating systems are dependent on
However it is also a worker’s movement in some ways not just a device user’s movement, and I think it will play an important part in the battle over Wall St’s tech cash cow globally.
Racists and Xenophobes will try to stop global collaboration,
Yes! Go on…
real conflict that matters will always be the smart vs the lowiq.
Uff… That’s some serious brainworms right there. How do you call your worldview? IQ Supremacy?
I wanna skirt by all the political stuff and ask what that text editor is?
Nope I’m keeping it
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.
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.
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.
FOSS has always been political. And usually fairly reactionary.
I think the Russians that would want to backdoor stuff would just use a name like John.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/linux-fellow-bans-university-contributing-kernel Or just suggest they back door the kernel to an American university
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.
“propaganda”? Oh. You mean like Russia started a full blown unprovoked war with a peaceful nation? That “propaganda”?
Sucks others got caught in the crosshairs, but that’s just what happens when your authoritarian government launches unprovoked wars and gets sanctioned.
Question: do you believe in the self-determination of Ukrainians?
Yes, the self-determination of the Ukrainian people, the western Ukrainians and the eastern Ukrainians both.
And I believe in the right of the Eastern Ukrainians to not be attacked by fascist western Ukrainian paramilitaries[1] with tacit & overt support from the Ukrainian government and the US.
And I believe in the Ukrainian state to not suppress regional languages.
And I believe in the Ukrainian state to not ban political parties.
Right, so how does the full scale, violent invasion by a foreign state help the self determination of both Ukrainian peoples?
It certainly is violent, as all invasions are, though it’s not a full scale invasion. Russia has not fully activated its military, and it has no intent on taking all of Ukraine. That would be a terrible idea, if for no other reason than the fact that
easternwestern Ukraine is very anti-Russian and has a lot of fascists who are virulently anti-Russian. It would be a terrible idea to try to permanently occupy it. In contrast, the annexation of Crimea was practically a cake walk, because most of the people of Crimea wanted to be annexed. And it seems it was for the best for them, because they didn’t suffer years of attacks by western Ukrainians like their neighbors to their north.Still, by international law the invasion was & is illegal, and it certainly is violent. After the 2014 coup, an anti-Russian government—blessed by Victoria Nuland (who had been on the ground handing out cookies for the coup)—was installed, eastern Ukraine declared its independence. This independence was not recognized the Ukrainian government of course. It was a very messy situation. Ukraine was in a state of civil war from the coup until the invasion. I don’t know what percentage of the people of eastern Ukraine welcomed the Russian invasion/liberation. 30%, 50%, 70%? I have no idea.
Unfortunately, as complicated as that all is, realpolitik can’t be ignored. For an analogy, consider the Cuban missile crisis (BTW we now know that the reason Russia & Cuba did that was because the US had secretly installed nuclear weapons in Turkey).
Imagine if Russia (or say China) were expanding its “defensive alliance” into south & central America, and making plans to expand it further, right up to the California–Texas border, which would likely lead to “defensive” nuclear weapons right on our back porch. Maybe they’re in talks with Canada as well, in an effort to “contain” the US. Realistically—regardless of what is internationally legal (which the US usually ignores anyway)—what would the US do?
The US has has been working a plan to break up Russia for the last thirty years. Ukraine is just a pawn to the US. This is the confrontation the US wanted, with the hopes of starting that Balkanization. It doesn’t give a rat’s ass about Ukrainians’ lives, never mind their self-determination. The US does this kind of thing all the time.
My question was: how does the violence of the invasion help the self determination of Ukrainian people?
I’ll be more explicit: why not simply acknowledge that the invasion is not only unlawful, but deeply immoral – and completely contradictory to the self determination of a people?
Absolutely, but that was intolerable to the US, which is why they coup’ed its government in 2014 and installed a puppet one.
Yes and the 33 million people whose lives have been uprooted by the invasion, are undoubtedly very happy Russia is ‘fixing’ this with violence.
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NATO Expansion: The argument that NATO’s eastward expansion “provoked” Russia is often linked to Gorbachev’s 1990 talks with Western leaders. However, this promise was tied to Germany’s unification, not a blanket prohibition on expansion. And importantly eastern european countries sought NATO membership because of their historical (and justified) fears of Russian imperialism (a dynamic Marxists should understand as nations seeking sovereignty free from external dominance.)
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Western Involvement in Ukraine: The U.S. supporting a regime change in Ukraine in 2014 is thought to be imperialism. But ignores the agency of Ukrainians, who led the Maidan protests because of already existing deep dissatisfaction with Yanukovych’s corrupt, oligarchic regime and his pivot to Russia. Supporting popular uprisings against oligarchs should align with Marxist values even if “the West” has its own interests
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The Role of Fascism in Ukraine: Yes, Ukraine has issues with far-right groups like so many countries but exaggerating their influence as a justification for invasion serves to divert attention from Russia’s own reactionary politics. Far-right elements in Ukraine do not define the country’s political landscape, nor do they justify imperial aggression from another state. Russia has its own history of fostering right-wing authoritarianism.
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Minsk Agreements: While the West" and Ukraine could be criticized for their handling of the Minsk agreements, Russia also violated these accords by continuing support for the separatists. Both sides share blame for the failure of Minsk, but it doesn’t make Russia’s invasion justified. Ukrainians didn’t provoke a full-scale invasion; they were defending their sovereignty.
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NATO as a “Defensive” Alliance: Criticism of NATO’s imperialistic behavior is fair its actions in places like Libya show it isn’t 100% defensive. But in this case, NATO’s expansion was driven by countries seeking security from a historically imperialist power. Ukraine wasn’t “provoking” Russia by wanting self-determination; it was trying to secure its future.
You’re trying to push this “Actuall, but Ukraine DID provoke” narrative by mixing in unverified, ideologically biased material with references that are legitimate, but isolated incidents. Like linking far-right activity to justify the war conveniently ignores Russia’s (I should probably say everyone’s) own far-right issues. Marxists should reject imperialism in all its forms, including Russia’s actions in Ukraine.
“Actually, but Ukraine DID provoke”
Mostly NATO, and by that I mean mostly the US. The Ukrainian state is in bed with and dependent on the US, so yes it was and is a participant.
mixing in unverified, ideologically biased material with references that are legitimate
The implication here is, the more biased, the less trustworthy/factual. This is false, and anyway, I don’t think you fully see the bias baked into the supposedly unbiased sources. And “unverified” I suspect means not blessed by Western states (which are run by the capitalist class[1][2]) or Western NGOs (which are funded by Western states and the capitalist class) or Western corporate media (which are owned by the capitalist class).
isolated incidents
Liberals often view history that way, but historical materialists don’t.
Yes, Ukraine has ties with the U.S., but sovereign nations have the right to choose their alliances. Ukraine’s Western integration stems from its desire for self-determination, not just U.S. influence. Russia’s aggression isn’t justified merely because Ukraine sought NATO’s support.
Bias exists everywhere, but dismissing “Western” sources wholesale, while elevating openly ideological ones, doesn’t strengthen the argument. Marxist critique should apply equally to all capitalist states, including Russia, which operates under an oligarchic system that exploits its own people. 1 2
While far-right elements in Ukraine are real, they’re a small part of the picture. Reducing Ukraine to these groups oversimplifies the conflict. Most Ukrainians are fighting for sovereignty, not fascism.
Russia’s actions are imperialist too, and as a Marxist, you should critique imperialism wherever it emerges, not just from the West.
I hardly dismissed Western sources wholesale. Plenty of my links are to Western corporate & NGO sources.
Ukraine’s Western integration stems from its desire for self-determination, not just U.S. influence.
I mean, you say that like the people of Ukraine chose that path, but they didn’t. The Ukrainian oligarchs did, specifically the oligarchs that aligned with the US for the 2014 coup. They decided to bet on that horse. But I think it’s a stretch to call that self-determination.
Yes, Russia is shitty as well, and no less an oligarchy than the US. And Ukraine has been shitty & famously corrupt for decades; that didn’t start with Poroshenko. Russia, if given its druthers, would be imperialist, but since it presently doesn’t, it presently isn’t. Putin tried to join NATO once, to join the imperialist club, but that was rejected, because the US wanted Russia Balkanized & plundered instead. Russia has figured out it’s better off allying with Global South countries than attempting imperialist adventures upon them. And this war has accelerated that allyship.
“The people of Ukraine didn’t choose that path, the oligarchs did.”
It’s true Ukraine has a history of oligarchic influence, but the 2014 Maidan protests were a massive, popular uprising. Ukrainians were fed up with Yanukovych’s corruption and his decision to abandon the EU agreement for closer ties with Russia. This wasn’t just oligarchs pulling strings; millions of Ukrainians demonstrated for a future that aligned with Europe, seeking more autonomy from Russia.
“Russia would be imperialist, but isn’t right now.”
I would argue that Russia is acting imperialistically. The annexation of Crimea, the war in Donbas, and now the invasion of Ukraine are clear examples of Russia asserting control over its neighbors. Even if it’s not globally imperialist like the U.S., these actions align with a regional imperialism that Marxists should still oppose.
Ultimately, this isn’t about picking sides between oligarchies, but supporting the principle of self-determination for Ukraine, including resisting imperialist aggression from any direction.
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Does invading your neighbor count as international collaboration? Not that all Russian people can be held directly responsible for the actions of their government.
You do realize that the US has invaded far more countries than Russia has, do burgerlanders have no self awareness at all?
@yogthos @theunknownmuncher I am in the US and I realize this. There was a funny meme a while back about look how aggressive Russia is, they put their country all around our military bases. Unfortunately there is a lot of truth in that. What other country has military bases throughout the world?
@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.
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.
Absolutely fair point. I agree with you on this portion of your comment.
@theunknownmuncher And I could give countless other examples of other countries. I don’t agree with the war, but I also know if we hadn’t installed Zelenskyy and if the United States had honored our promise to Russia not to extend NATO past East Germany, then it would not have happened. So I understand that it is hardly one sided on Russias part. If we didn’t fund Ukraine, if we didn’t offer them membership in NATO, none of this would have happened. And I’ll add if the Ukraine and Russia did not have large oil reserves and some other precious minerals, the United States would be a lot less interested in them. But that’s all in the past. Now, you and I can disagree with each other and we can disagree with what our governments do, but if we want to build a better world it has to happen through the cooperative efforts of citizens NOT governments because the latter just historically a lot less likely to happen. So I can’t see this move as at all productive towards ending this particular war or world peace in general, I see it as quite the opposite.
Wait, what?? Zelenskyy took office after being democratically elected in 2019. Russia invaded Ukraine and annexed the Crimea region of Ukraine in 2014. Your timeline does not check out there.
Zelensky took office on the promise of normalizing relations with Donbas and Russia, and then proceeded to do the opposite. Also, wonder what happened in 2014 that might’ve provoked a response from Russia there.
@theunknownmuncher Your timeline doesn’t go back far enough and I notice you completely ignored the bit about Eastern expansion of NATO and what the United States promised Russia.
Your justification of genocide is both ludicrous and gross.
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.
Linus is an absolute cunt for not only following this gleefully but then attributing pushback to “russian trolls” and “state propaganda” fuck you man.
These people weren’t the MIT pricks who inserted vulnerabilities into the kernel, they were contributors who did hard work and helped advance FREE software. Linus is now turning his back on the GPL and manning it clear that Linux can be controlled by the US state on a whim.
How exactly is he turning his back on the GPL? Those Russian maintainers are still free to fork the kernel, make whatever changes they want, and release it. The GPL has never guaranteed that a maintainer has to take contributions from anyone. Open source could never function that way.
Yep, anyone who is celebrating this is shortsighted and letting their own nationalistic ideas and jingoism cloud their judgement.
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.
The US is the most belligerent nation on earth, shall we ban american contributors? How about israeli?
Should their code be removed from the kernel?
The real question i haven’t seen answered is Who owns the kernel code. Torvalds owns the Linux™ but that’s to prevent others from buying it, but i was under the impression the source code is owned by all those who contribute to it and not whoever happens to be employing Torvalds at the time. Or is it a matter of where https://git.kernel.org/ happens to be hosted?
I’d suggest Codeberg but that’s in Germany, so maybe another forgejo instance hosted maybe in Switzerland.
Who owns the copyright is irrelevant. Russian developers are still entirely entitled to use and modify the Linux source. The only thing they can’t do is submit their changes for inclusion in the main Linux development tree. The only real consequence for them is that their changes might be broken by future kernel updates and they will have to fix it themselves to use newer kernels. That, and they will have to maintain their own distribution system. I’ve also seen nothing to suggest anyone’s code is being removed.
The US didn’t invade Ukraine and, obviously, isn’t under US or European sanctions. I’m sure that you and I could agree on a great deal when it comes to American foreign policy, it’s just not relevant to this situation where Russia is the clear aggressor. (Setting aside the usual “buffer zone” bullshit that every aggressor state uses and Putin already abandoned).
Who owns the copyright is irrelevant.
It is, which is why i focused on where the repository is located and whether that determines possession.
Possession is irrelevant too. Access to source code has not being restricted, and doing so wouldn’t even be realistically possible. The only practical change is that new updates from these developers will not be published by the Linux Foundation, and ongoing integration will not be done by mainline Linux developers.
If Russia wants, they can fork Linux at any time, call it Rusinux, and do whatever they want with it. They could even port future Linux updates back to their kernel. They still have to keep it under the GPL2 license, but only if they want to honor Western copyright laws and treaties.
Sure, if words are meaningless.
Linus Torvalds Confirms Decision to Remove Maintainers from Russia
You couldn’t come up with a more powerful spit in the direction of FOSS. And from Linus, who is now kind of showing f*ck to the entire community. Here you have freedom, openness and all that. Today they just wiped their ass with it, and by one of the founders.
This is the moment when the split politics, dirty ones from all sides, have penetrated into the very heart of OpenSource - into the Linux kernel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_YozYt8l-g
This is such an odd thing to do… I really cannot see the benefits for the project doing this. Maybe those maintainers were payed for their work and sanctions prohibit paying them or something?
Or maybe some Russian State backed programmers have tried to slip in backdoors in various key systems, numerous times. Including one that almost went live on millions of machines.
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.
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. 🤕
@griefstricken @chaogomu Seems to me, after the Stuxnet incident, any US claims of bad foreign actors are a bad case of the pot calling the kettle black.
The funny thing is Stuxnet is a good example of how sanctions can backfire. We used a supply chain attack and the Iranians hardened their systems. Can anyone really claim it was any different than another Mossad “humiliate them and hope something happens” operation that ultimately blew the cover off years of intelligence work?
The Lebanon pagers attack, Russian sanctions and CERN or Linux creating reverse brain drain will continue to backfire, on our ability to even twist these screws, also on our supply chains in countries which consider themselves a US target or even just a middleman.
Dont forget Iranian
Lol
I wonder if there are any official US documents declaring an intent to hide cyberattacks under the flags of foreign nations? 🤭 Wouldn’t that be droll?
While this is completely appalling, I cannot say I am shocked considering what Linus posts on some platforms and in some conversations. Really not surprising.
Don’t take this justification seriously for a second. This is the check coming due for a community with leadership still beholden to western political hegemony, the intellectual appratus that decides who gets educated and what is published, etc etc. Getting a bit offtopic. View this in the same context as CERN kicking out Russians. Mask is coming off of science, democracy, freedom of speech and all that nonsense made up to spruce up the myth of civilization versus barbarity.
yup. these so called “open” projects are being kneecapped in the name of American empire and Linus is celebrating it.
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
LMFO I was on the reddit thread reading this post and coudn’t believe my eyes reading the comments. We’re living truly revelation times. Like you said this is a long due wakeup call for the rest of the “uncivilized” world.
Hey, Torvalds! 🖕
he makes me want to switch to bsd
is bsd safe from this? where is their foundation based?
university of california
Same here! I’ve been eyeing OpenBSD for quite some time now.
Greg sent out the patch but won’t respond to mail list questions. Sad to see Linux leadership bend the knee
Those nasty Russians might reveal or remove some of our back doors.
