Strongly opposed to any sort of sanction regime that results in this.
If Project P in Country A is identified by Country B as a potential target for planting cyber-attack-enabling backdoors, Country B has an incentive to find people to put a backdoor in P.
If Country B is a free country with rights and ethics, they will say "Help us put a backdoor in P. We'll pay you very well for services rendered," or try to get someone who already works for Country B intelligence into P's management structure.
If Country B is an "evil" country, they will do all of the above, but will also tell people of influence in P who live or have family in Country B or its allies, "Help us put a backdoor in P. If you refuse or if the backdoor doesn't work or if the legitimate workers of P find it and remove it before it helps us, you'll be arrested and/or tortured and/or killed and/or your family too."
Removing Russian based kernel maintainers from positions in which they could conceivably help insert a backdoor into the kernel hopefully removes the incentive for the Russian government to threaten (or carry out) horrific violence against these individuals and their families.
True life-changing money, in all absolute sense.
If your system relies on people being in "a free country with rights and ethics", then you have a bad system widely open to abuse. After all, who decides which country is "free" and which is not? White house? Should you exclude people from all "non-free" countries?
People/companies do this because lawyers tell them that there is a risk that the activity may violate sanctions. And yes the lawyers are probably overly conservative, but that's because there often isn't a way to know for sure whether something is actually a violation until you end up in the courtroom.
You've outlined a justification based on a kafkaesque stockholm syndrome vibe. The system doesn't work as well as it's being advertised, does it?
Not being in active occupation war would be a good start.
Not that I disagree with the move 100%, but I don't think it's that clear cut.
Linus holds the trademark. The copyright holders are the contributors to the source code. Nobody "owns" it, that's the point, it's an international project.
It also made me realise what a cushy, insular world I live in not having to worry about those threats when I write software. Made me more aware of what others might face.
When a society starts shadowboxing figments of its own imagination, that is not a good sign for the health of the society.
1. The mechanisms for its existence exist
2. There is motivation of a large enough scale
3. The scale of the actors is large enough
The Linux kernel is very large, and nation-states like Russia are also very large. There is a very high motivation for a backdoor to exist for the Russian government. And the mechanisms are certainly in place to create such a backdoor.
So, I conclude there would absolutely be a Russian backdoor planted, if it isn't already. For the same reasons I conclude Windows probably has multiple backdoors for US agencies.
As a side-note, the scale of the Linux Kernel matters here. It's over a billion lines of code. It's truly trivial to sneak in an exploit and have it never be discovered. You can't prove a negative here - just because we haven't seen an exploit doesn't mean they don't exist. Also, we have found MANY bugs in the Linux kernel. Are they exploits intentionally planted? Virtually impossible to tell. Some bugs have existed for decades before discovery.
You should assume your operating systems already contain many exploits. Thus, we have tools like encryption, firewalls, and trusted repos to protect us anyway.
Note this doesn't mean I support the move. Certainly, any other country could implant backdoors (and probably have already). However, the Linux kernel kind of sort of belongs to the West, and the West kind of sort of has an alliance. So it makes sense why Russia is singled out.
> the Linux kernel kind of sort of belongs to the West,
I don't agree.
For the same reason, I can be highly confident there is at least one person stealing office supplies at Amazon. And I can be highly confident there are some examples of data theft in automobiles. I just use the same principles as above.
> I don't agree.
Okay. How?
The vast majority of Kernel developers are from the West and live in the West. The kernel was created in the West. Management is in the West. And the majority of large tech companies are Western, so probably the majority of Kernel users are also in the West.
Therefore, the West has a majority control over the kernel, and they have a huge incentive to "protect" it to how they define that. That's that, and we can tell this is the case because it wasn't Russia banning western devs from kernel development, was it?
Also: on the topic of chaos, this is why the "motivation" bullet point exists. If there's no motivation, I can't be sure, due to chaos. Chaos means even things that should happen may not. Motivation, particularly of the financial variety, cuts through the chaos of humanity. I am very confident in asserting that and I think pretty much all of history supports that.
cough xz cough
the Linux User Group of Northern Virginia, the suburb of DC with all of the money, used to hold their events at local Palantir office.
lotta Red Hat contracts with the FedGov. And RH commits a lot of code to the kernal and other FOSS projects.
If the Russian government is blackmailing you your are certainly screwed. In US.. well it depends but you could quite easily bring down the people doing this to you with yourself if you chose not to comply. Therefore no rational US government "actor" would engage in something like that outside of extreme circumstances.
I personally don't see much difference between "going down" and "going down together with other people". At least for myself and my family. I'm screwed anyway.
I think Australia had something called Technical Capability Notices (TCNs) back in 2018? For legal entities for sure, not sure about hobbyists.
The last paragraph also makes the whole situation sound like someone cares for Russian developers' well-being. I highly doubt it was ever the intention.
register a free gmail account and come up with a fake name. Gotcha. Certainly no bad guy will ever think of this.
How child play and naive you're thinking of politics. If Russia ever had that degree of power to control the behavior of its citizens, it would have already ruled the world.
You can't even fully control a 5-person band and you're telling us that magically Russia is able to control millions of people, amongst which none of them know justice or human rights enough to leak any info. You know, even under the infamous assassin attempts from FBI, Snowden managed to flee to Russia. How can Russia be more powerful than the US in this way?
I'm not saying good words to any regime. I mean both the US sanction and the Russian invasion suck. I don't want another country bossing over what you can do, and I don't want another country pointing guns on your head either.
They’ve literally killed most powerful and influential opposition leader on open display. Use your brain, it’s not hard.
What you wrote is very logical but it doesn't explain who defines how "evil" the country is. And the answer is "US". All your 4 paragraphs could be rewritten with "US defines if you are worthy or not". Which sounds real and quite disappointing to many people who thought Linux is a shared effort of the humanity
I haven't followed the original events but I understand their actions. Probably they need to have "no russian developers" ticked for compliance for some defense contractor. So they have run "grep -rF .ru .git/" and found russian developers to remove to tick that requirement. I would have probably done the same -- it's easier to do it that to explain to many people why those people aren't evil
To this casual bystander it seems like they usually hurt innocent citizens far more than the leaders of the usually authoritarion regime that it targets.
That's kinda the point. The common folk put pressure on their leaders to correct their behavior.
Has that strategy ever worked?
But sure.. usually it doesn't really work out.
Of course weakening the target country economically, politically and militarily is still better than nothing,
Do you not think that at least 50% of all people in Russia would vote for Putin or his affiliates (even if the elections weren't falsified)? Therefore most people in Russia are certainly not innocent.
> "lowest classes"
I find it hard to believe that there aren't plenty of people who are middle class and above who support the regime. After all Russia's economy is almost entirely based on raw resources extraction and (now) military related industries.
> If your image of the Russian society is based solely on US left-wing media
And yours is based on Kremlin propaganda channels and media sources? See what I did there? Both assumptions are equally valid/invalid and neither contributes anything to a meaningful discussion besides immediately shutting down the possibility of one existing.
We can and know that. Just talk with your fellow Russians.
Nor are Americans, by this standard - what we've done directly in Syria & Iraq is quite bad and enjoyed substantial popular support.
if you really think so strongly about it maybe you should run "Red Star OS" instead