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Comment by arp242 | Hacker News Reader

Baikal is kind of a political project to start with.

They were already sanctioned by the Obama admin because they were "associated with military procurement activities, including the development of computer systems for military end-users and the production of computers for nuclear research". That was rescinded a year later. Now it's back for reasons that should be obvious.

You can ignore what's going on in the world and say that open source is completely detached from that, or you can say you're not comfterable going out of your way to include support for Russian processors for Russian arms. Clearly there is some point at which you can't ignore politics: few people would claim IBM did nothing wrong selling the Nazi regime equipment.

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So there was nothing wrong when Raiser killed his wife to keep his FS in kernel, right? Everybody felt comfortable? But now when "Reds" involved, it's different!

Don't any of the major US companies involved with Linux have huge contracts with the DoD?

Didn't IBM the current owner of Redhat supply equipment to the Nazis which was used to document and track Jews?

By the way who are the "We" in "We don't feel comfortable accepting patches from or relating to hardware produced by your organization."?

The guy looks Polish by name. They (the Polish) are now "very good friends" of Ukranians except when the Ukranians are also gypsies and they hate Russia.

There are a lot of 3 letter agencies submitting patches to the linux kernel ( for ex. NSA). Do they feel "comfortable" accepting patches from those organizations ?

Have we made bad decisions in the past, yes.

Should we continue to make those same bad decisions now, no.

Well, we do.

I don't know who the "we" is; you have to ask the person who sent that message. Presumably it's the people responsible for that code.

I explicitly mentioned IBM's involvement in the holocaust. But that's a historical event; not an on-going one. You can trace the genealogy of almost everyone an everything to something evil if you go back far enough.

I think comparing the Russian and US military is a false equivalence. Do I think the US is innocent? No. But it's just not on the same order.

> I think comparing the Russian and US military is a false equivalence. Do I think the US is innocent? No. But it's just not on the same order.

Of course. The US killings look almost "human" (Serbia, Irak, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Corea etc). And having other country's people killed just to follow US interest shows a lot of empathy. /s

War is always bad, messy, and rarely "clean", but comparing the toppling of fascist nutjobs like the Taliban to a completely unwarranted invasion of Ukraine is borderline bad faith, as is blaming the US for the Yugoslav wars (guess they should have just let the Serbs genocide the Bosnians and Albanians) or going back 75 years to the Korean war. By that standard we should also hold Stalin's purges against Russia for all perpetuity, or Japan, Germany, and Italy for the second world war. These thing are just not the same thing at all.

> I think comparing the Russian and US military is a false equivalence. Do I think the US is innocent? No. But it's just not on the same order.

Seriously?

Setting aside those that the US was directly involved in such as Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, how about the war between and Iraq and Iran that the US urged Saddam Hussein on which resulted in about 500,000 dead, for starters? In those days Saddam was the bestie of the US so long as he stuck it to Iran.

How about the sanctions on medical supplies to Iraq which resulted in about 500,000 deaths of Iraqi children?

Have you forgotten about the invasion of Grenada and Panama that the US invaded to install governments after their own heart? Very much like Russia's invasion of Ukraine only those wars were very much shorter because of the overwhelming might of the US.

Sadly the war on Ukraine is lasting much longer because Ukraine has the support of the US, until the US decides that China warrants more attention.

> Sadly the war on Ukraine is lasting much longer because Ukraine has the support of the US, until the US decides that China warrants more attention.

... Sadly? I guess the Ukrainians should just bow over and welcome their new Russian overlords? Or what are you suggesting here?

I'm not going to comment on every single example, but in many there is significantly more nuance to most of them as I've explained in some other comments already. Does that mean it's "good"? Not necessarily, but it does mean it's just not the same as a completely unwarranted baseless invasion. The specifics of the situation DO matter and you can't just tally military interventions like that.

> ... Sadly? I guess the Ukrainians should just bow over and welcome their new Russian overlords? Or what are you suggesting here?

Life for the masses of the people is generally the same no matter who rules them. When this war is over the Ukrainian rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer as it has been in the US for the last 40 years or so.

The idea that life for Ukrainians under Russian hegemony will be worse than life under a EU/US hegemony is false.

The Ukrainian regimes of the last 15 years decided to turn the country into one the sticks it to Russia on behalf of the US. They basically sacrificed their countrymen's wellbeing to service the geopolitical goals of the US and now Ukrainians are suffering dearly for it.

Read this - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35180460

I can't be repeating myself on the Russian/Ukraine war ad infinitum.

This war is not being sustained for the benefit of ordinary Ukrainians. This war will end, and that end will involve negotiations, whether this year or in 10 years time. The main sufferers here are the Ukrainians, not their political leaders who have stashed enough abroad to live comfortable lives no matter the outcome of the war, and the US can bribe them even further to prolong the war as much as is possible, much as they bribed Saddam Hussein to prosecute the war against Iraq for 8 years.

Whatever the Western powers are doing in Ukraine, is it not for the benefit of the ordinary Ukrainian, just the bankers and the industrialists.

> Life for the masses of the people is generally the same no matter who rules them.

Dead wrong. Countries that the Soviet Union occupied in WW2 are a great example of that. They were near or at parity with Western Europe in 1930s, but after 50 years of Soviet occupation, they barely exceeded pre-occupation levels in main economic metrics by the late 1980s. After the Soviet Union collapsed, countries like Lithuania have seen their GDP per capita increase by 10x, approaching Western European levels that they had before. The Russian rule was a sickness that held them back, robbing several generations of economic development and prosperity. I'd rather die in a trench than experience the same Russian-imposed despair, hopelessness and utter poverty what my parents went through.

Total nonsense. When this war is over, the Ukrainian people will have survived by avoiding Russian fascist purges as we saw in Bucha and other deoccuipied places. That's why Ukrainians are fighting back so fiercely, against all odds, and ready to suffer all hardship. It's about survival and no more no less.

"Dear Linux fairly. As I said for a year I have nuclear weapons that I want to trow over Europe but their CPU's were designed for Mandrake and we lost the installation disc. It will not run the newest redhat anymore. Sourceforgevik couldn't helped with our technology dependences and I'm very sad for this.

Please include support in the kernel for fixing my hardware problems so I can bomb Finland and Swedden, Thanks.

XOXO, Vlad"

What they mean with "good try man, but that would be extremely stupid?" This is soo unfair!! Grenada!! Panama!!

And the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact led to most of the 60 million dead in WW2, including 25 million Russians.

I want to stop this thread because they always end up in stupid comparisons.

This is about a fricking code submit.

> Do I think the US is innocent? No. But it's just not on the same order.

It really depends on propaganda. Sadly, you don't get it. IMHO open source shouldn't be a place to decide who's wrong or who's right.

> You can trace the genealogy of almost everyone an everything to something evil if you go back far enough.

When watching "Finding Your Roots" and other genealogy shows I always think when the interviewer asks the person how they feel about the misdeeds of an ancestor: We are all descended from rapists, murderers, and cannibals.

And as you imply, we've all done bad in our past. That's part of the experience of learning. It's what we do now that matters. A moment of silence for everyone's first pet.

You're right. The US has murdered far more innocents and invaded many more countries in the last 50 years than Russia has in its long existence. Introspection is sorely lacking around here.

Russia has invaded 2 sovereign countries since 2000; USA has invaded at least 4. That's roughly the same order.

If you're going to count the US roles in interventions in Libya and Syria as "invading a sovereign country," it is only fair that you apply the same logic to Russia. This means you have to at least include Russian intervention in the Syrian civil war--which is larger than the US role in Libya or Syria, natch--and arguably it is fair to include interventions in which Wagner is a major player, which includes Libya, Mali, and the Central African Republic.

This is false. The Syrian government invited Russian assistance against the combined invading forces of US/Israel/Turkey/ISIS. Accepting an official invitation is by definition not an "invasion". Heck, Assad was in Moscow just days ago! You are out of your depth here.

I used the terminology "intervention", and not "invasion", for a reason.

If you're going to quibble, the US never sent any forces to Libya. France and the UK provided aerial support to a no-fly zone imposed by a UN resolution, with the US providing some naval support as well. So why does that qualify as an "invasion"?

(Actually, if you really want to quibble, Russia has invaded Ukraine twice in the past decade--the Russian invasion of Crimea/Donbass in 2014 should probably be counted as distinct from the invasion effort starting in 2022, given that they provided very different levels of support and had very different material war aims.)

FYI, Russia also euphemises their "invasions" as "interventions".

Which is more plausible when the target of your invasion shares a land border with you.

  > arguably it is fair to include interventions in which Wagner is a major player

So then we need to include Blackwater and the like too? Well shit, we're well into the double digits now for US foreign "interventions".

Afghanistan was ruled by a bunch of religio-fascist nutjobs.

Iraq was ruled by a genocidal dictator.

Does that mean those wars were a good idea? By my estimation, probably not, for a number of reasons. But they're not they're same thing at all as Russia's invasion of Ukraine. It's borderline bad-faith to even compare it.

I don't which other two you're referring to, but I'm willing to bet they're not the same thing at all either.

Do you realize how Orwellian it is that you cannot name some of the most prolific and brutal invasions that the #1 superpower has carried out during your own lifetime? This is basic historical literacy. Libya and Syria (ongoing) are the obvious ones you are missing.

Anyways, I'm not going to play the "let's take turns justifying the illegal invasions of distant sovereign countries" game.

United States never invaded Libya or Syria in the same way as Russia invaded Ukraine, or the US invaded Iraq. Both are essentially civil wars where the US was (and continues to be?) involved, but that's not the same thing as an invasion.

You can dismiss it as a "game", but the reasons and specifics of the situation DO matter. A lot. Denying this means, for example, that the Nazi invasion of Poland is just the same as the allied invasion of Nazi Germany. After all, both are foreign invasions in a sovereign country. No reasonable person would agree these situations are the same; the invasion in to Nazi territory was horrible because all war is, but was, in the end, a good thing. The same cannot be said about the invasion of Poland.

"We came, we saw, he died" ~Hillary Clinton, speaking about our role using the CIA to oust Ghaddafi leading to his death by anal knifing and the resulting power vacuum that they still deal with today. Now in 2023 Libya has open air slave markets[1] and tons of missing uranium[2], another job well done. We have zero moral authority, that ship sailed decades ago.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2018/03/21/595497429/...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/tons-uranium-mis...

When you aggressively invade and destroy the government of a sovereign country, there is chaos, a power vacuum and civil war. This is what Washington did in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria (failed).

Arguing that Washington technically didn't invade any of these countries because there were already internal tensions is laughably stupid (what has been happening in Donbass since 2014?). Kindly knock it off.

> Afghanistan was ruled by a bunch of religio-fascist nutjobs

From an atheist perspective, the US looks exactly like being ruled by "religio-fascist nutjobs"

Not really; I have plenty of quibbles with the GOP, but its nowhere near the Taliban. Your somewhat racist and sexist uncle is also not literally Hitler.

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