The most important piece of software in the world is being made worse on purpose so that Putin has a 0.4% higher incentive to stop a war he's winning by a wide margin.
this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2024
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This makes Russia incentived to double down on on the war, though, as there is less and less room for normalization of relations.
The kernel has already been forked. The Linux-libre project maintains a completely-blob free kernel and people gave them shit over it. Why develop more kernels? why not centralize development? Now we have a clear example of why not to do that.
This seems to be an attempt to stifle Russian hardware development from occurring in upstream. This means nothing to the actual downstream developers who will have their own kernel tree for their users in Russia.
Love to see all the "POLITICS IN MY LINUX???" losers start flame wars over being proven wrong.
Inb4 Chinese devs get removed for "compliance", maybe they'll just go mask off next time and say the real reason.
Honestly nobody should ever really be shaming for forking. It is the basis of all open software and all successful software development in history. Linux itself is obviously just a fork of Minix with GNU. And it is the traditional means of open-source and forking with which communities can and should quickly move away from bullshit like this to prevent corporate/government monopolization of it.
Agreed on not shaming forking, but creating a serious fork for anything substantial takes a fuckton of effort and many times you wind up with multiple mutually-incompatible source trees. In libre, community-run software, it's almost always advantageous to settle your differences and centralize efforts than to fork and split the efforts.
Most forks die because its hard to get people to jump ship. Think about how much lemmitors cry about Lemmy, the devs, and lemmy.ml, yet they cannot muster the effort to keep kbin alive or get sublinks off the ground. OG Hexbear was eventually rebased back to upstream too.
When forking, there are a few paths, all having some serious disadvantage:
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Soft fork and remain at the mercy of the decisions of the project you forked from unless your fork becomes the de facto default. This is usually only really beneficial if you want to rectify disagreements on a handful of small features. (e.g. Ungoogled-Chromium / Brave vs. Chromium, various Linux kernel forks)
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Hard fork and lose compatibility of upstream patches, making keeping feature parity difficult. This is only really beneficial if your fork gets a critical mass of users/devs and can outpace upstream at features users want. (e.g. Forgejo vs. Gitea, Lemmy vs. OG Hexbear)
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Rewrite from the ground up, building the same or a similar API but upon a better architecture. This is the most effort, but keeps compatibility with the ecosystem, and potentially has a massive payoff once fully implemented (e.g. like Tvix vs. Nix, OpenHarmony vs. Android)
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Write an alternative from scratch, focusing on implementing the most important features and not caring about feature parity. This is the best balance for small utils, but you lose the ability to be used as a drop-in replacement. (e.g. lsd / eza vs. GNU, ripgrep vs. grep)
Getting a critical mass of devs onboard is key to success, but also difficult. Outside of some open core software making some shitty money-grabbing decision and sparking community outrage, that's not very probable.
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This may legitimately be one of the most damaging moments in western hegemony moving forward. The one area where BRICS and other non-westerm blocs have not made major strides to dissociate from the west is Linux; even North Korea uses its own Linux distro domestically. A large part of the reason for that is that it's traditionally been seen as such a stable and generally apolitical kernel that the usual worries about spyware in your firmware isn't as big of a concern, so China and Russia don't have major concerns about leveraging the kernel for their domestic industries. Hell, Russian programmers have been massive players in open source development traditionally.
This is fire across the bow for Russia, and you can be sure some bureaucrat in Beijing is taking notes right now.
Is the open source movement even viable without highly skilled but underemployed Russian technical labor?
For real, even in game communities we've had several Russian contributors reverse engineer entire game engines.
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.
Like with every failed colonial war, the losing side gets more and more desperate for a "final victory" in some grand counter offensive or wonder weapon or other bold strategy.
Every time, it is a massive gamble that has a massive cost at the slim chance of a reward. At some point, sunk cost fallacy kicks in and everything becomes potential ammunition to throw at the enemy.
even North Korea uses its own Linux distro domestically
Russia also uses one in some portions of its state.
The entirety of Torvalds' angry tantrum in response to the backlash, posted about 17 hours ago (emphases mine):
Ok, lots of Russian trolls out and about.
It's entirely clear why the change was done, it's not getting reverted, and using multiple random anonymous accounts to try to "grass root" it by Russian troll factories isn't going to change anything.
And FYI for the actual innocent bystanders who aren't troll farm accounts - the "various compliance requirements" are not just a US thing.
If you haven't heard of Russian sanctions yet, you should try to read the news some day. And by "news", I don't mean Russian state-sponsored spam.
As to sending me a revert patch - please use whatever mush you call brains. I'm Finnish. Did you think I'd be *supporting* Russian aggression? Apparently it's not just lack of real news, it's lack of history knowledge too.
So, Russia taunts this bitter man in his dreams, it would seem. Russia in his laundry. Russia in his fucking corn flakes. Nanoscale Russian worker gnomes in his CPU changing the words of news articles he reads. It couldn't possibly be that fucktons of people out there see this political Western-influenced kernel clownshow for what it is, or that they might disagree with Western narrative on global issues. Russia Russia Russia! Dude sounds like the average reactionary USian did when China was at the forefront of COVID news.
In a follow-up he posted:
I'm also not going to start discussing legal issues with random internet people who I seriously suspect are paid actors and/or have been riled up by them.
In asserting that his toys are his and nobody else is allowed to look at them, he sounds like someone who's been watching way too much Alex Jones.
All Russians are Hamas energy.
Also love that reactionary bit about being Finnish, and history. One of the users in the commit comments took issue with it too, maybe you saw this one already:
A few more good ones that resonate with me:
edit: replaced screenshots with darkmode versions
Everyone who disagrees with me is hamas/russiantrollfarm/chinesebot/$$nexttargetparameter$$
Russia gave 60 bucks to Cambridge Analytica in 2016 and now expressing anything but absolute bloodlust for citizens of NATO adversary countries activates hundreds of Rachel Maddow sleeper agents accusing you of being a Selenium script.
I'm glad I'm not the only one considering the long term viability of Linux.
Even if you think this is good in the short term this is going to be escalated in the future. what about when (not if, when) other BRICS countries get added to the list?
Would you celebrate Brazil being banned from "American" technologies? India? what if a country in Europe turns on American geopolitics? What if (or, when) GPL software was leveraged against Italy to force them to restart weapons trading with Israel? Or leveraged against South Africa to drop (or neuter) its ICJ campaign?
The US is clearly making a stand that is untenable even if it is acceptable to you (hypothetical redditors/.world user) personally for this one moment.
you can tell he's bitter about his dad being in the russian communist party lmao
I'm Finnish. Did you think I'd be supporting Russian aggression? Apparently it's not just lack of real news, it's lack of history knowledge too.
I take it, we are to interpret this as Torvalds supporting NATO aggression, given the fact that he didn't apply the same standards to people from the relevant countries.
It couldn't possibly be that fucktons of people out there see this political Western-influenced kernel clownshow for what it is, or that they might disagree with Western narrative on global issues.
Probably not even that.
Knowing software devs, most of those opposing are probably doing so out of the same anti-moderation "muh censorship" brainworms that surface every time a project tries to give some Nazi the boot or adds a code of conduct.
Libs being this overzealous convinced a good number of chuds to automatically come to Russia's defence out of pure contrarianism.
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Other than Linus' evident chauvinism and the conflicts created by firms like Amazon/Microsoft buying into Linux over the last decade, there's no reason the maintenance of a shared global kernel can't include contributions from multiple "Linux Foundations" globally.
It's interesting reading. Seems a lot of sole maintainers have been removed, so lots of important parts will start breaking. There's also a lot of acknowledgement in the comments that chinese developers are an essential part of Linux development nowadays. And the US just gave China a very good reason to not collaborate on their projects, and there'll be plenty rightly pissed off Russian developers who'll be looking for something else to work on..
Just as the US is losing economic dominance, I wonder if this is the beginning of similarly losing its dominance in software development.
If the Russian and/or Chinese kernel maintainers decide to work on a sovereign kernel project, I'm definitely cloning their repo and will hopefully help with the project as long as the US Empire doesn't stop me. Because the US keeps ruining my career and technical libre hobbies, I hope to move to China at this point.
Ya rab I pray
Wow Torvalds is a jackass
Yes he is, and always was. His 'techbro asshole' archetype was a point of immense pride among his devoted followers, it was most visible on slashdot and newsgroup discussions back in the late 90s to early 00s. My personal take is that he's an undiplomatic, impatient, total prick, always has been and still is, regardless of whatever personal redemption arc people claim he took on in recent years.
My question is, why do this only 3 years into the war? This would've gotten far more support from libs right after the war started.
feds are incompetent of course
the main issue is that their recruits either have to be VERY dumb (to think that they are the good guys) or comically evil
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Mirror of the commit on GitHub with lots of comments: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/6e90b675cf942e50c70e8394dfb5862975c3b3b2
seems bad
the feds are probably behind this
Linux is canceled time to go openbsd
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