I for one am going through quite a culture shock. I always assumed the nature of FOSS software made it immune to be confined within the policies of nations; I guess if one day the government of USA starts to think that its a security concers for china to use and contribute to core opensource software created by its citizens or based in their boundaries, they might strongarm FOSS communities and projects to make their software exclude them in someway or worse declare GPL software a threat to national security.
Nope. Politics is part of being open source.
As for US strong arming you don’t have to be a US company for them to do that. RISK-V and ASML have been targeted by them in the past to prevent Chinese use.
RISK-V and ASML have been targeted by them in the past to prevent Chinese use.
reading the broad points regarding RISC-V, I think my worst case scenario is apparently just the present day.
i’ve been contributing to open source for a year or so now and i’ve found the politics of projects affects contributions greatly
Yes. There is an extremely arbitrary distinction made between the USA and Russia. Both are known for injecting spyware. China is somehow still okay? It makes no sense.
Not to mention the elephant in the room by not banning another certain country actively committing war crimes.
All software should be safety checked. Where the maintainer is from should be irrelevant.
But the most weird aspect is the timing. Why now and not a few years ago?
All part of the current US/NATO approved Overton Window, friend.
China is somehow still okay?
China is too important a supplier to the West. Sanctions against them would lead to retaliatory sanctions against the West from China which would be economically devastating.
Obviously they are just as dangerous and as actively involved is espionage as the other world players, but they hold too many cards to risk escalation. The West is also too important to their economy to escalate beyond war games. At least - we all hope so.
It wasn’t a culture shock but it made something obvious that sometimes gets forgotten. The “Open” just means that one can look at the source code and copy it to make a new version. There is no obligation of the original creators to support things outside of what they want/can do.
Of course. It’s still just a software project.
Not really, open source projects don’t necessarily have to be open to all contributors and I was aware of this already. They have to be open to anyone doing what they want with the code, by definition, which is good, but they don’t have to allow everyone to contribute to upstream. I’m not sure if there’s any particular defence against this being used in a discriminatory manner, but I do think this effect is significantly mitigated by the decentralised nature of open source and the fact that it’s not too uncommon for forks to become preferred over the original, the fact that open source projects rise and fall in popularity, etc.
I wonder if there’s some way to manage an open source project so that it’s not subject to particular national laws in this way.
It’s not decentralized on the level of project development, the visible proof of which is what we’ve seen happen.
How many times have you seen two branches of a significant project to coexist with comparable popularity?
I wonder if there’s some way to manage an open source project so that it’s not subject to particular national laws in this way.
Yes. Pseudonymous software development. I’ve seen Ross Ulbricht’s name today, so we also know the risks.
Naturally this is closer to some underground warez than to copyleft, because the legal ways of protecting copylefted information against appropriation will not be available. A different paradigm.
Well, in theory open source is immune to all that. However, the country a project is registered at, matters. That’s why the RISC-V project, for example, took its headquarters from the US to Switzerland. For that exact reason: so no country could strong arm it, especially since Chinese were the major contributors to the project (Switzerland is not 100% neutral, but it’s more neutral than other countries).
Just this one. The philosophy is still there, Linus and TLF have abandoned it with great hubris. I am very disappointed in them.
I’m thinking about that conspiracy theory of Linus having been made an offer one can’t refuse, when some time ago he took a vacation and returned with news about seeing the error of his ways.
It almost coincided with Stallman being canceled for one of his usual highly socially unacceptable, but in principle consistent opinions. With most of the attackers being frankly some new random corporate-associated people, not very active in real communities.
Maybe I’ll re-read J4F and compare Linus from there to these events. Canary and all.
EDIT: Before you downvote this for the mush in my head (thx Linus) propagating conspiracy theories, offers one can’t refuse are not exactly an impossible thing. And WWII radio games, where, having captured an enemy station’s operator, one of the sides could either imitate their style in transmissions or just force them to transmit what it wanted.
I mean he has accepted a position as a luminary at the x86 ecosystem advisory group the most dominant and proprietary instruction set ever formed by companies with vested interest to keeping it in use and prevent competition (RISC-V & ARM) from catching up.
This shows that no open-source project can really be directed from the US, or if they are then a fork should exist and be maintained by BRICS citizens who are obviously viewed as lesser, at least in the Linux project.
I just wanted to say that I have the same questions, and it’s a relief to see it posted by someone with more courage. I’m too ignorant to contribute to the discussion though. I don’t know how a government or private entity could pressure a FOSS project in this way, unless that pressure was put on the project’s git platform. At which point the repo just moves elsewhere.
I think the prestige of “maintainers” and contributions/control are what is being torn down. Anyone anywhere is still welcome to contribute, they are simply limited from direct control. They can still fork at any time, anyone can. Getting people to follow your fork is another thing entirely, and your open source code will still likely be incorporated directly or indirectly. The only thing that has changed is the misguided prestige that has grown around the project and is not a required or relevant part of the project as a whole.
Hasn’t changed my view much. I already knew Linux was a company that has a legal presence in the US and so would be subject to their laws. The only real surprise is that it’s taken so long to action this particular set of sanctions.
I do think the announcement was poorly handled - it should have been explained either before or immediately afterwards to cut back on the conjecture. The git notice only said that these contributors’ names had been removed from the credits, not that they’d been stopped from contributing completely. Any company, including Linux, that does something they know is going to be contentious like this should bloody well get ahead of that curve and put the facts out.
The world is at war. It’s not a bloody world war as we’ve seen before, but it is nation against nation by other means. FOSS is used so widely it is absolutely a target and nobody can be so idealistic that they cannot see the conflict, nor not know that it’s constantly being attacked. Where you live does matter. I wish that wasn’t the case - I truly do, but it’s naive in the extreme to pretend otherwise.
This wasn’t a decision made based on sanctions, it was just an excuse given but no actual evidence of Linux being required to act on them was ever given.
Why do you think Linus is not being truthful?
Because of the tone he used when making his announcement and the white nationalist references to the Finno-Russian historical squabbles
Other countries are similarly sanctioned, and hundreds of maintainers from those sanctions are still there. So the sanctions thing is absolutely just an excuse.
What Linus just did to Russians is scaring a lot of people right now, who are probably wondering if they should keep working in association with a project which has just demonstrated its unreliability.
So like what happened
Nothing is devoid of global politics.
Russian maintainers were unceremoniously kicked out citing compliance issues.
Certain Open Source movements are pure bigotry and opportunism, the Linux Kernel / The Linux Foundation for example, so it doesn’t really make me wonder.
Yes, bad actors can exist everywhere, it doesn’t really help anything but fragment the project and harm it, do we need multiple directed forks ? Fuck no it will be best if everyone can monitor and contribute, I kind of think of it as they do peer reviewing in research and shit, it’s always better when more people can view it, that will leave less room for biasing and frankly detect bad actors easily
Linux at this point is an absolutely critical part of the information infrastructure our world is built on. It’s not just a few nerds in basements cobbling together code. Safeguarding this infrastructure against bad actors is absolutely crucial for everybody’s safety. Unfortunately we’re going to see more of this kind of stuff in an increasingly polarised world.
Israelis are more known for putting backdoors wherever they can than Russians, for example.
Anyway, nation-states are not the only kind of group with malicious interest. Maybe a maintainer is a member of some mafia, I dunno. How are you going to know this?
Many things can be done with FreeBSD. Again, in our time it may get some popularity again not because of such events even, but because of their possibility and to avoid monoculture (in the context of backdoors too).
From what I understand this wasn’t a decision dictated by sanctions nor was there any strongarming. Otherwise it would’ve happend way earlier.
I also think splitting politics and literally anything else doesn’t work and is something people who benefit from the discussion (or lack therof) made up.
