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.

Those kinds of problems aren't particularly new (PGP comes to mind as an example back when you couldn't export it out of the US), but it's a reminder that a lot of open-source comes from the US and Europe and is subject to western nation's will. The US is also apparently thinks China is "stealing" RISC-V.

To me that goes against the spirit of open-source, where where you come from and who you are shouldn't matter, because the code is by the people for the people and no money is exchanged. It's already out there in the open, it's not like it will stop the enemy from using the code. What's also silly about this is if the those people were contributing anonymously under a fake or generic name, nothing would have happened.

The Internet got ruined when Facebook normalized/enforced using your real identity online.

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?

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.

It just shows how hypocritical and Western biased the community is. Are Israeli and US maintainers ever going to get kicked out of projects for their countries many crimes? No of course not, they would never apply their own standards to themselves, which defeats the point of them in the first place.

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

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.

Not realy since Open source is most of the time still the best Option, and you cant realy controll Open source since there is always the option to fork Things. (For example If the US decided that China ist a NoNo the Open source Community in EU or India can do what they want since it is not under their jurisdiction)

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.

I'm ootl. Quick summary?

I'm out of the loop, what's the recent Linux drama? If you don't wanna type it out, you can point me in the right direction. Thanks. :)

There was more drama? I didn't even notice. They're always doing drama.

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.