Phoronix: Several Linux Kernel Driver Maintainers Removed Due To Their Association To Russia
Several Linux Kernel Driver Maintainers Removed Due To Their Association To Russia
Hello Internet commenters. Please remember that there's no rule that says you need to tell us all your gut reaction to this if you know absolutely nothing about the situation.
But then there would be no Internet! /s
I have seen pictures of Linus Torvads so I feel that I am uniquely qualified to explain whats going on. Let me break it down for you.
The Linux Kernel is meeting compliance requirements by removing Russian maintainers.
Thank you all and have a good night.
The problem is they aren't even saying what those requirements are even after numerous inquiries about it.
Don't you think its wrong to ban someone only because of their nationality? I mean for real man. Every country in the world has done some fucked up shit but open source software is supposed to go beyond politics and ideologies.
They weren't doing anything malicious it was wrong to remove them.
Dude, WHAT. This is totally against what Linux and Open source in general stand for.
I don't support the thing that I'm sure was their reason for this but I definitely don't support banning someone from contributing to an open system solely off nationality.
So what eventually only the "good guys" can contribute to and use open source software? Who exactly decides who the "good guys" are in this scenario? USA? China?
The implications of what this can cause in the future for potentially all of the open source community is absolutely sad. We should welcome all our fellow human beings to contributing to open source.
Reminds me of a comment the other day on a post about Ventoy. Whatever the situation there is, which definitely needs clarification still, the person was saying that you shouldn't trust it at all because the maintainer is Chinese, even though he has emigrated away. Because the CCP will be able to leverage his family still there to force him to create a backdoor.
That's just thinly veiled racism in my opinion.
That's plain racism honestly.
I knew a (asian) guy who was working for a government contractor serving the US military. The racism is very serious to say the least. He got framed when something went down and was almost tried with treason. (that carries the death penalty) The authorities hit him with questions about his loyalty to the US for 5 hours even though he grew up in the US and so did his parents.
As far as I can read from that, they're still maintainers, just have had their credit removed from the contributors page, no?
Still a strange thing to do and I look forwards to an explanation.
@BobGnarley @kixik Yep this is definitely not a step forward.
Kernel development is for
only.This is poetry
"Compliance requirements"? The kernel's american now?! WTF?
The commonality of all these maintainers being dropped? They appear to all be Russian or associated with Russia. Most of them with .ru email addresses.
Not short-sighted in the least...
Similarly, the driver code remains within the kernel -- including for Russian hardware such as around the Baikal CPUs from Russia's Baikal Electronics.
Not a hypocrite move at all...
Are israeli developers blocked as well? How about all american developers considering how the US foreign policy keeps fucking everyone up all over the place in the name of liberty and freedom... of oil?
You do realize that the Linux foundation is an American based entity right? It isn't a shock that it is bound by US law.
They employ Torvalds, Torvalds owns Linux™. Who owns the code?
The kernel's american now?! WTF?
Now we see the intended outcome of the "Inclusively" movement of the past few years.
I can't wait to see this "Inclusively" extended to China, India, Brazil and others.
We'll truly be the most Inclusive ever!!! What a great thing!!!!!!!!!!
The open source / FOSS movement in China is pretty rad. I use a sweet all platform text editor maintained by Chinese devs only.
People should be more wary of the control universities, NGOs, finance through those, law enforcement infiltration etc from US, Euros, Japan, South Korea, Aus has over open source projects due to technology being such a high national security priority.
Guess we're just going to be racist and run with the misdirection of criticism of US laws on to foreign enemies. Just go with the flow, I guess.
If they really want reverse brain drain it isn't my problem, it's their long term problem. CERN is also making a dumb mistake, all universities are in on this, it's imperial chauvinism.
I wouldn't be surprised if they did something similar for China at some point. (If tensions worsen)
I don't see them doing anything outside of that
I am quite disappointed at the lack of transparency regarding this.
This is a shame, I always thought Linux was supposed to be an International collaboration, hate to see it caught up in this bullshit political agenda.
I agree to this. I was literally just in the shower thinking how Linux, the space station, and the Olympics are the only times we as humans come together to collaborate
@secret300 The project to discover elements 119 and 120 which previously were a US/Russia collaboration also put on hold. All of humanity moves backwards when we fight, nothing is gained.
Banning CFCs went pretty well too
You know that Russia wasn't able to compete in the Olympics or Paralympics this year, right? The individual athletes weren't banned however, but they had to compete under a neutral banner and weren't in the parade of nations.
Edit: I should have added, was disgusted because Israel were allowed to compete. Huge double standard there.
Political agenda is a funny euphemism for imperialist invasion and genocide.
this is the genocide you must be referring to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHWHqj8g7Bk
Gee i'm glad israeli maintainers are being blocked as well.
I totally think them invading Ukraine is fucked up too but I also think the Israel situation is messed up too and would you be against someone maintaining code just because they are from Israel?
That would be wrong. Linux is supposed to be about more than political alignments its supposed to be a collaborative effort its always been about that.
This is wrong and its super wrong they don't tell anyone what compliance they are following or who issued it to them which is also supposed to be against what open source is about.
@Midnight If Russia were the only one involved, and if weren't provoked by outside powers like say, oh, the United States, yea I could agree with you but my knowledge of history precludes my accepting that explanation.
No it was code started by Linus that got huge.
Does invading your neighbor count as international collaboration? Not that all Russian people can be held directly responsible for the actions of their government.
@theunknownmuncher The US has been involved in probably 300 regime changes throughout the world, has invaded many countries, including those that we were not affiliated with. Russia invades a neighboring country when we install a leader that is going to allow us to put missiles on their border. I really hate to see political hegemony get in the way of a good collaborative effort, we all suffer for it if we allow this.
You do realize that the US has invaded far more countries than Russia has, do burgerlanders have no self awareness at all?
Aside from the fact that it's pretty insane to suggest to kick someone off a project for no reason other than their nationality (the article doesn't say any of these maintainers supported the invasion or had any ties with the government), even if these people actively supported the government, as far as kernel development is concerned... I don't really care? If their contributions are good then I want their patches to be merged. Tor was made by the US government, which I in no way condone, but I still use Tor.
I'm sure removing these maintainers would be of great help to the Ukrainian war effort...
More seriously: We need to help Ukraine more. But this doesn't do that. It just hurts a bunch of people (both the maintainers, and the people using their code) for no benefit whatsoever.
Ehh they keep saying we are not involved we are not whatever. You can only say that so long. I mean the soldiers are coming from somewhere these are not people grown in vats.
"propaganda"? Oh. You mean like Russia started a full blown unprovoked war with a peaceful nation? That "propaganda"?
Sucks others got caught in the crosshairs, but that's just what happens when your authoritarian government launches unprovoked wars and gets sanctioned.
it's a pity that politics is penetrating more and more into open source and FOSS.
recently support for Russian cloud providers was cut out of opentofu. https://github.com/opentofu/registry/pull/824
now this. this is, of course, natural the core and many components of modern distributions have not been free in terms of decision-making for a long time and are under the influence of large companies, which in turn are under the influence of the USA.
It's a fact of life that politics permeates everything, nothing is in isolation of the political climate it exists within.
The state of the world today is a function of the politics that got us here, a big change in world politics can have dramatic and far reaching effects.
A healthy global FOSS culture requires collaborative politics to be the flavour of the day—which is unfortunately not the case in a lot of countries currently.
Open-source is politics.
MKTux
We had a time of peace everyone was dependent on each other. Now the world is fragmenting and we we’ll probably have war or at least high tension between the parties.
What was this alleged time of peace you speak of?
To be honest, the only reason why any of that appeared to be true, or the west appeared to uphold free speech, just like free trade policies and laissez faire approach to international finance, that was all just because Wall St did not feel threatened, that was all just because the propaganda was received unthinkingly for the past 30 years or so. Especially between 2001 and the first part of the financial crash.
Oh... USA is untrustworthy country and taints even regular good people by them having to live there. What can they do if CIA/DEA/CIS/DHS/SS/FBI or something calls and tells them to put in some code they want? Refuse and watch their loved ones rot in prison/get deported/disappear/die? Comply but risk telling the community they just did that?
Finland is an untrustworthy country. America is an untrustworthy country. You want special ttreatment for citizens of the NATO bloc despite constantly running intel operations and huge invasions since WWII and especially the 90s, thag got worse after they successfully desposed the former USSR and turned it into the capitalist shithole of the Russian Federation - which tried damn hard to ally with NATO before we pushed them away. No, it's not "harshly put", you have antique, vicious neoconservative politics and racist bullshit to back it up.
@reksas @fireshell There is no such thing as a trust worthy country because they're all run by politicians and there is no such thing as a trust worthy politician. There is an old saying, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
I think the Russians that would want to backdoor stuff would just use a name like John.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/linux-fellow-bans-university-contributing-kernel Or just suggest they back door the kernel to an American university
Error 500 can't upload the image but check these names for ideas on your next Russian puppet account:
https://imgur.com/gallery/even-more-american-names-from-that-japanese-baseball-game-6HAtN
Edit...I wasn't calling HIM a Russian troll. I was suggesting to use these names the next time AnYONE makes a Russian puppet account. Sorry, language.
Now what the actual fuck
Linus gives it a full green light and refers to negative reactions as Russian bot attacks
He's Finnish by heart even though he lives in the US. I think it is probably a pretty big worry for him that Russia might invade Finland.
I doubt this is something that he would initiate but if there was any pressure from other parties (I'm sure there was) I don't think he is going to fight it.
he's just an American nationalist at heart. his dad was a member of the Russian communist party and his biography seemed to make clear that rebelled from that.
socially he's not terrible but when the war drums come beating he's stepping in line for the stars and stripes
I understand that.
But he also sits at the heart of the open-source community, and his actions might ripple through the entire sector. With this much influence, allowing your personal fears to chime in is unacceptable.
Once we start fragmenting open-source the way we fragment everything else, we lose the very spirit of it and open doors to so much potential power abuse.
Besides, I really don't see how restricting Russian maintainers would prevent Russian military aggression. If something important there is powered by Linux, it can be forked and modified to serve a specific need. Not to mention Finland is now part of NATO.
Russia might invade Finland.
Finland's part or NATO now. Putin may be a lot of things, stupid ain't one of them. Ironically, this kinda backfired on him but can't say it was unexpected considering most scandinavians love the american dream.
Actually insane lol. But you can’t expect much from anybody who willingly takes money from IBM.
This is dumb. Corporate divestment, sure, of course, fuck their money and their power structures. But open-source developers are not generally gung-ho about the war effort... let alone propping up their local military-industrial complex.
This is the only plan the west has to win the war. Keep fucking over random Russians in the hopes Putin somehow becomes politically vulnerable over this, despite opposition getting weaker than ever throughoit the war and with the onset of sanctions. Now we are asking random Linux contributors, please come back when you've overthrown your government for us.
Russia is of course the only country that has ever invaded another country so it's only fair.
No matter how many vulnerabilities are introduced into software by western allied intelligence agencies, we should never be held accountable for dealing with them ourselves. After all Russians are uniquely responsible for their tyrannical government because of their Asiatic brainpans.
Linus is an absolute cunt for not only following this gleefully but then attributing pushback to "russian trolls" and "state propaganda" fuck you man.
These people weren't the MIT pricks who inserted vulnerabilities into the kernel, they were contributors who did hard work and helped advance FREE software. Linus is now turning his back on the GPL and manning it clear that Linux can be controlled by the US state on a whim.
Yep, anyone who is celebrating this is shortsighted and letting their own nationalistic ideas and jingoism cloud their judgement.
There is a hot war going on and the US is using sanctions to isolate Russia from using western technology to continue their genocide. That goes a little beyond "nationalistic ideas". Russia is being isolated for their actions and this was past due. It sucks for the Russian maintainers, but under the heading of "war is hell" this is a minor inconvenience.
How exactly is he turning his back on the GPL? Those Russian maintainers are still free to fork the kernel, make whatever changes they want, and release it. The GPL has never guaranteed that a maintainer has to take contributions from anyone. Open source could never function that way.
Linus Torvalds Confirms Decision to Remove Maintainers from Russia
You couldn't come up with a more powerful spit in the direction of FOSS. And from Linus, who is now kind of showing f*ck to the entire community. Here you have freedom, openness and all that. Today they just wiped their ass with it, and by one of the founders.
This is the moment when the split politics, dirty ones from all sides, have penetrated into the very heart of OpenSource - into the Linux kernel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_YozYt8l-g
@BCsven @fireshell Or Linus from moving the organization back to Finland, or Iceland, or Switzerland, or some other more neutral territory.
Kernel cannot follow or not follow any legal rules. Linux Foundation can.
And if regulations become a serious issue and go against the spirit of open-source, it is time to move the Foundation somewhere else.
That is interesting, my comment got removed.
If we follow through with it, I would absolutely never ever trust anyone from the US, for example. US is very much known for cyber espionage and shady operations, and could absolutely backdoor Linux.
This is all power play, and it comes from a very certain direction amidst this political struggle.
You want your open source code not to have backdoors? Review it meticulously. This is really the only way, and the one an entire open-source community relies on - pretty successfully, by the way.
by this logic it turns out that the code quality control system is built in such a way that if someone has malicious intent and wants to add malicious code, but is not affiliated with dubious structures, then he will easily succeed? Hey, what about enough eyeballs and shallow bugs?
Yeah better discriminate based on nationality /s. But why stop at that? Poor people are too easily bribed can't have them. I hear the CIA recruits from top US universities, can't trust those college grads either. Anyone belonging to some homophobic church or religious group? Better not what if they're closeted gay and get blackmailed? Anyone in a monogamous relationship should be excluded for the same reason, if you think about it. tips forehead
If only there was some sort of review process for code to get into the kernel...
@MrAlternateTape @fireshell sarcasmBut Stuxnet proves nobody in the United States would do that./sarcasm
My first thought is that this was to make Linux palatable to western regulations, like how companies can't use Kaspersky anymore. Stupid if I'm right because it's not like the fsb is going to sneak spyware into Linux.
Edit: Linus commented on this and I was right: https://lemmy.world/comment/13034386
They very well could. However, it also could come from some US intelligence agency as well.
Wasn't that XZ Utils backdoor recently with state ties or am I just remembering wrong
No one knows yet. Given the scale of the operation it's most likely a large organization.
Possibly, but that's a much smaller project being run by 1 guy. Linux has a lot more people and reviews involved.
This is such an odd thing to do... I really cannot see the benefits for the project doing this. Maybe those maintainers were payed for their work and sanctions prohibit paying them or something?
Or maybe some Russian State backed programmers have tried to slip in backdoors in various key systems, numerous times. Including one that almost went live on millions of machines.
But where do you have information that it was russian state? There are many state actors capable of doing this. Just saying
it isn't like Americans would do that, right?
Even Wikipedia, which is a shockingly bloodthirsty pro-NATO outlet, admits there is zero proof that a "Russian state actor" did this, there are just "western security experts" claiming it (as usual), and opinion is divided.
Did you even read this or do you just vaguely remember a Wired article? I have been able to see through these obvious ploys since I was a teenager reading about cold war propaganda (okay that was like 5 years ago but still SMDH)
Great sign for discussion that hacking is still being treated by Redditors as Russian, Chinese, and North Korean until proven otherwise. 🤕
What I see is that someone is arguing the point that all Russians are criminals. If someone is sending bad code, they usually just get banned, this time it's preventive measures based on ethnicity.
Comments do drastically differ between .ml and .world. On .ml, you'll see more sympathy towards Russia and China.
But the issue on hand is way bigger than that. It's importance is not in Russia getting sanctioned somewhere else - it's in the destruction of openness and trust in the open-source community, which has far more reaching consequences. What has been done is pretty unprecedented - and dangerous.
And I'm surprised other Linux communities are silent on the matter.
I can't stress how much the western supremacists are off the rails on this one: agreeing with the standard sanctions policy commonly used by the US, of punishing entire civilian populations based on the actions of their government, regardless of how you feel about that government and its actions.
Code is code, the nationality of the person shouldn't be used to exclude them. ppl know how most of us here feel about Israel but I would never even think of excluding an Israeli contributor to any of the projects I work on.
You should stay on reddit.world or sh.itjust.twerks telling your fellow Redditors about how we need to send billions of dollars to foreign wars that RAND corporation and Chatham House have admitted they never intended to win (they thought Russians would overthrow their own government if enough Ukrainian men and adolescents die on the battlefield long enough, pure strategic genius, Zapp Brannigan would be proud).
If you make your points with less belittlement, we mods will have to spend less time fielding reports.
The latest report that I saw was Russian attrition was nearing a collapsing rate in which the expected experience and levels of fatigue of renenforcments were to mean the expected casualty rates would climb exponentially on their side.
You act as if we killed your dog. There is nothing stopping you from moving on. You can jump to an instance that is more agreeable to you or you could create a big block list. However, lemmyml has earned a bad rep from the rest of the community.
While this is completely appalling, I cannot say I am shocked considering what Linus posts on some platforms and in some conversations. Really not surprising.
Don't take this justification seriously for a second. This is the check coming due for a community with leadership still beholden to western political hegemony, the intellectual appratus that decides who gets educated and what is published, etc etc. Getting a bit offtopic. View this in the same context as CERN kicking out Russians. Mask is coming off of science, democracy, freedom of speech and all that nonsense made up to spruce up the myth of civilization versus barbarity.
yup. these so called "open" projects are being kneecapped in the name of American empire and Linus is celebrating it.
Greg sent out the patch but won't respond to mail list questions. Sad to see Linux leadership bend the knee
Dude seriously and I can't believe how many people don't seem to see how sad that is in this thread.
Even if you hate this country or that, not even responding about it and keeping the code and using it anyway and only removing the attribution to the maintainers they removed (although that will escalate to banning them altogether I imagine this seems like a step one kind of thing) is just salt on the wound .
Super sad shit honestly.
honestly, i'm not even sure i'd blame him. who knows what kind of pressure he's getting behind closed doors
LMFO I was on the reddit thread reading this post and coudn't believe my eyes reading the comments. We're living truly revelation times. Like you said this is a long due wakeup call for the rest of the "uncivilized" world.
Actually I'm interested how it looks legally ( it somebody cares about it at all ). Whether the Russian contributors could ask to revert their changes as they most likely never signed the contract to transfer their code copyrights. For sure it will have a big impact on foss because if you have at least one American and Russian contributors, you may get in the biggest shitshow. Additionally if I was considering now to become a contributors, I'd be wondering if it's worthy at all to work for free and then to be banned no thanks for whole free work years
IANAL, but I think the general answer is no. When someone contribute code to an open source project, although they aren't giving up their copyright, they do grant the recipient (and the rest of the world, for that matter) a license to use their code. In case of Linux, this is the GNU Public License. Unless GPL has a section about license revocation that I am not aware of, you won't be able to take your code back.
So I think good luck for foss movement. Hopefully, forking that project won't be illegal because otherwise foss will die
Are the Russian trolls in the room with you right now?
Please report those comments so we can remove them too plz.
As a Finnish person I wholeheartedly agree with Linus.
But Torvalds is from Soviet Finland [SF]
Spent too much time in .ml I see
Nonsense personal attack
Admittance of 'all eyes on code' being bullshit.
@linuxisevil @madthumbs Sorry but Dave Plumber isn't at the top of my list of trusted sources. I don't expect someone whose got a vested interest to be neutral.
Well my Uncle says that 5Ghz is how they program your brain to make you OK with getting vaccines. (Vaccines are government mind control bots)
Also this is a Linux community (you are brave)
Dave Plumber is pretty damned objective.
I don't agree with communists either but open source software is supposed to be about more than that
@BobGnarley @possiblylinux127 My take as well, but for the record, Putin is well aware of how Bolsheviks affected his nation and not eager to repeat it so not a big supporter of Communism himself.
What communists?
How to piss off people 101.
Do you fail to remember how the tech world collectively cringe at one guy who intentionally injected malware into his own npm library to delete all data from Russia and Belarus?
Couldn't think of a more lemmy thread topic than one involving both Russian geopolitics and linux.
This one is scratching a ton of itch.
There has to be a way to fit Star Trek in too...
part of me is sad that there aren't many .worlders defending blocking those evil tankies. lol
Yes there are, I think you guys should block .ML and enjoy your botted shithole website. Better your feed be an obvious echo chamber full of hate.