this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2024
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It's really awesome to expel by nationality, even including people who've long moved out and immigrated years ago and don't support the invasion and war waged on Ukraine /s
Honestly fuck Russia ofc, but this goes a bit too far into the grey area between hawkish-reasonable and discriminatory, and on the latter side I'm not sure who and/or what this is meant to help, nor does it seem particularly fair to those individual contributors to keep their code yet remove attribution and mailing list entries.
EDIT: holy shit the bloodlust in the comments here is actually unreal, even on arr slash neoliberal and the politics communities here on lemmy the comments are way more sane.
Why are people so fundamentally incapable of nuanced judgement. According to people in this comment section, a human is entirely defined by their country of origin. What is this witch hunt level, toddler IQ thinking. Are people really so desperate to have a "bad guy" that they can blame everything on? This dehumanization of people is wild to me.
This reeks of Americanism, yanks are absurdly obsessed with race and nationality
The irony of your comment is not lost on me.
But yeah if you were to measure a country by its loudest voices then that would be accurate.
That's missing a big part of the justification here. When you're from a given country, that country frequently has a lot of influence over you. You probably have family and other ties in your home country, and those can be used as leverage to get you to do what the state wants. And when your country is in active opposition to a large portion of the free world, it makes a lot of sense for people to be extra cautious in who they deal with, because it's never clear if that person is being manipulated by their former state.
So excluding someone based on nationality can absolutely make sense as an easy rule of thumb to avoid most of the problems stemming from that state.
Would you agree it's a good thing to avoid US software as they've incorporated secret surveillance into law through letters of national security to private companies?
And by extension, perhaps even shunning US citizens?
As a US citizen, I care less about where the software comes from, but who hosts that software, so I tend to use FOSS products and services, preferring to self-host where it's not too annoying.
I don't think anyone should shun citizens from any country, but we should be wary of trusting citizens from countries where the government has a larger influence. So we should be hesitant to trust people from Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran (and a bunch of others, I'm just listing the official enemies of the US), especially if they still live in those countries. That doesn't mean we should shun people from those countries (I have an awesome coworker from Iran), just that we should hesitate to put them into influential positions. I have no problem collaborating with people from any of those countries, I just think we should be a little extra careful when there's a stronger incentive for their government to get involved (and manipulating Linux is attractive for pretty much every government, esp. my own).
“I'm an American, and therefore I'm better”
We're literally talking about Linux Foundation making these changes to comply with requirements of your government.
In leadership, not code. That's a pretty big difference.
I also think we shouldn't have people from the NSA, CIA, or FBI as maintainers either, because they have clear conflicts of interest. That said, I think it's a lot less likely for the US government to extort a maintainer to let bad code through than the Russian government. It's much more likely for the US government to try to hide bad code in the normal review process, and I'm sure that happens w/ Russian spy agencies as well, but allowing someone in a region that has demonstrated that they're willing to strong-arm people into doing things that benefits the state (i.e. through threats or even outright force) to hold a maintainer position in a very influential piece of software isn't a great idea, especially when their government is choosing to be an international pariah.
I have zero problem with Russians contributing code to the kernel, I just think it's wise to remove Russian citizens from leadership positions to limit the impact of Russian interference in Linux development.
Because as long as the Russian state exists and can point to their "history" as an empire and use it as an excuse to take over their neighboring countries (like Latvia, the place where I'm from), I won't be satisfied.
Unfortunately nobody is bombing Moscow yet, so anything that isolates and makes the population more angry and can hopefully topple the government is a good thing in my book
Have you even read the policy? "The people removed from maintainer positions were identified as employed by companies on the US and EU sanctions list. These companies are directly involved in the Russian military complex and therefore are directly complicit in war crimes being committed daily in Ukraine". Racist? My ass.
Yeah. Times like this I wonder whether a better world is even really possible, or whether social liberalisation was but a blip on a trajectory of bigotry, antagonism, tribalism and savagery.
Even in harmless contexts, the commodification of national identity as the first and foremost trait of a person even for the purposes of smalltalk or jest always makes me think if perhaps most are far more nationalist than they'd care to admit or even themselves think. It's a haunting thought.
It's disappointing behavior by Linus. It's understandable that sanctions could force the removal of people just for being Russia.
His reply however shows he personally is in favor of removing people just for being Russian.
I wonder if any of the people who pressured him to take some time off for being a "jerk" will give a shit for this response.
Isn't that a violation of the GPL?