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?

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.

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).

Is this really Linux drama though? It seems more like political drama that ended up jizzing on Linux.

I mean, yeah, there's been drama after the decision was made based on legal issues brought about by political drama, but this part of it isn't, if you get the distinction.

The only real linux drama part, as far as I can see is the crappy way it was announced, which isn't what most of the people involved in the drama after the fact are complaining about.

I dunno, I'm not complaining about the post here, just talking about the overall issue itself using the post as a jumping point.

Anyway, I guess what I'm getting at is that foss development can't be immune from political fuckery (no matter how justified or unjustified it is). Everyone that's going to be involved in development is going to live under some nation's thumb, and is vulnerable to any legal ramifications of that nation. So there's no way to prevent a project being strongarmed; all that's possible is having enough people that can review the code do so, so that any fuckery that affects the project is known, so that everyone can decide what they want to do about it as individuals.

As long as individual people have the ability to use any foss software they want on their own devices, there's a limit to how bad the fuckery can get. Tbh, I'm more worried about corporate fuckery in foss projects than governmental

What happened this time?

Edit, answered elsewhere:

Recently, Linux removed several people from their organization that have Russian email addresses. Linus made a statement that confirmed this was done intentionally. I believe that there was some mention of following sanctions on Russia due to the war. I haven’t looked into the details of it all, so take my analysis with a grain of salt. From what I understand, it sounded like it was only Russian maintainers that were removed and normal users submitting code from Russia can still contribute. Maintainers have elevated permissions and can control what code gets accepted into a project, meaning that a bad actor could allow some malicious code to sneak past. This may have also contributed to the decision since this type of attack has happened before and Russia seems like a likely culprit. The reactions to this change have been varied. Some people feel it is somewhat justified or reasonable, some people think that it means it is no longer open source, and some people think it is unfairly punishing Russian civilians (it is worth noting that that is part of the point of sanctions).

Open source means open source, I never assume anything else from open source projects.

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.

Yes. If FOSS projects bend the knee to shitty laws just because “they are the law”, then FOSS is free labor for corporations with no gains for the people.

@Artemis_Mystique No.

It changed my view on how true to their ideas some people are.

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.

Just this one. The philosophy is still there, Linus and TLF have abandoned it with great hubris. I am very disappointed in them.

No

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

No, only of Linux

Yes. I always thought of sanctions as being finance-related, meaning you can't transact with sanctioned groups. I figured it couldn't apply to decision-making/membership in non-profit organizations (that it might somehow violate "free speech" or some shit). Finding out this is not the case is terrifying and one more reason to hate the US (not that we needed more). This might disincentivize some people to contribute to FOSS.

Unfortunately no.

I remember the selinux controversy and the nsa trying to slip bad algorithms in.

No.

Same here. For now it's only barring contributors which won't harm actual users much, but that could change in the future with the precedent this is setting.

What's the point of "FOSS" at that point if it's not so different from corporate products, being similarly vulnerable to sanctions? I could see genuine free software being relegated to piracy communities if it goes that far.