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Linus Torvalds affirms expulsion of Russian maintainers
(www.theregister.com)
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this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2024
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I think given the current political situation this is the right call. No one knows what the Russian government might compel otherwise innocent devs to do.
That said, we (and I mean society, not any particular individual) should be mindful that we don’t slip into bigotry.
I’ve worked side by side with RU devs who were both personable and damned competent. Never were their tech skills in doubt, and I retain quite a bit of respect for those individuals.
I’d not do the same today explicitly because of the political and compliance implications. It’s unfortunate, but necessary.
i wish there was more we could do to help russians topple their dictatorship
Necessary for what?
Linus is from Finland. Not hard to remember reasons for aversion to Russian propaganda for anyone raised near it.
Blanketing the Linux Foundation as American based kind of sounds like you're a Russian troll.
Linus lives in Oregon
This is hardly the first time the core Linux code stack has been forked and independently developed. Seems like this is going to invite a Russia-specific development environment that just pulls in updates from the main branch and adds in Russia-internal development (which will likely then be copied by non-Russians and backloaded into the core Linux stack under someone else's name, because why waste good dev work?)
But the argument appears to be anyone with a Russian-sounding name is getting removed from the core development team, until they can prove to the American team that they aren't... spooks, I guess? Also
So this isn't such a high security risk that the code is being pulled (presumably because its been vetted and appears beyond repute). This is purely a CYA move to eliminate veterans on the team because they were forthright about their identities.
Its not clear how a policy of booting people based on their surnames accomplishes this.
I could mention all the forks that Linux currently has, please.
Isn’t most of Linux open source?
All of it is. But its still possible to sneak backdoors into Foss software (though magnitudes harder). See xz.
Not gonna lie, this is kinda a refutation of the whole open source model. I was led to believe that it shouldn't matter who writes the code, as long the code is able to be interrogated/corrected.
Removing people from CREDITS looks like someone should have been mindful before acting.
They were removed from MAINTAINERS, which is what identifies the people responsible for maintaining a piece of code, a subsystem of Linux, not the credits, which is encoded in the git commit history.
The current ceo of usa is supporting a genocide in gaza and the former ceo is a fascist. Does the same logic apply here?
I think pressure should be put on the US to divest from genocide. Sanctions from our allies would be helpful... Surely with the international court declaring Israel's actions a war crime it is easy to make a case for it.
Our election system has fucked over anti-zionists and needs reforming, which is happening, but not by this November.
Ranked choice voting is gaining popularity, electoral college is under pressure and people are fed up with voter suppression and gerrymandering and things are moving in a positive direction on the local and state levels.