technology

The West seems to be doing whatever it can to accelerate its decline.

American hard power is about to be hard countered, so America's massive amount of soft power could provide a nice floor to keep a comfortable position on the world stage after its coercion mechanisms are thwarted. But they keep trying to weaponize their best means of post-multipolar relevancy.

Using the Linux kernel to push their short term geopolitical objectives is about as large of an unforced error as can be made.

Having the most developed open source ecosystem gives the US & EU disproportionate influence over the direction of the technology sphere; an advantage adversaries are incentivized to avoid trying to circumvent because no one wants to waste time reinventing the wheel.

Yeah, it'll probably slow Russian technological development a little for awhile until non-Western ecosystems mature, but this will hurt the West far more in the long run than the relative edge they get over Russia.

Any countries not explicitly Western-aligned will see the writing on the wall and take steps to build homegrown alternatives that can't be used for leverage over them...and they can start just by forking the Western projects.

Russia, China, India, Brasil, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia will comprise a vast majority of software developers, and their projects will inevitably outpace their Western counterparts as more countries develop, especially if this trend of wielding FOSS as a geopolitical coercion tool continues.

What happens when China has a runaway technological edge and decides to take giant strides to build and migrate their products/systems to a homegrown kernel?...now 30%+ of global manufacturing is built without consideration for Linux compatibility and interop. Soon any software wishing to take advantage of top hardware begins to target this new kernel and Linux kernel support becomes an afterthought. Shortly after, new APIs and programming languages are built to target these platforms, with bad/no localization to Latin & Germanic languages, possibly even using hanzi or cyrillic instead of latin characters. Then you wind up a tech ecosystem where cultural factors disadvantage Westerners instead of the opposite in the current status quo.

Throwing away global leadership to take cheap shots at Russia.

Meanwhile, Russian devs & Russian companies will make sockpuppet personas and accounts, fork the kernel, and ignore licensing since they're gonna be blocked from Western markets regardless.