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Comment by mipsi | Hacker News Reader

You missed the point, he didn't mention history in general, but specifically "Finnish history". In this respect it's not about British colonialism but more about about Russian imperialism / Stalinism (see Russo-Finnish war 1939).

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Did he just now realized that history? For over 30 years accepting contributions from the "enemy"? Then when the history is employed, how about he as a Finn bans also Swedish contributors?

Did you just realized that Torvald is not racist or anti-russian at all? He didn't block any russian maintainers until today (more than 2 years after russia turning genocidal imperial again).

The correlation of the historical anti-Finnish aggression with present aggression and direct new threats against Finland is fairly recent, and Linus isn't pointing to his awareness of the historical and present national context as a reason for the action but as a recent why it is silly to expect him to be lax about the legal advice that is the reason for the actions.

Linus is acting based on his country's historical grievances, it only makes sense that other projects make decisions based on their own maintainers' grievances - if we approve of this as a good way of making decisions in open source. That's my point.

And even with Linux, it's not Linus' personal project anymore, hasn't been for decades - it's a global project with developers from many countries with their own views and biases. Being BDFL doesn't mean that your geopolitical agenda becomes the whole project's. Or at least, it wasn't so blatantly put on display previously that that was the case.

A high profile project like Linux doing this will have long term repercussions for how open source operates globally.

That's quite a misrepresentation of his statements. "I'm Finnish. Did you think I'd be supporting Russian aggression..." is certainly not about grievance. As a matter of fact, the russian aggression is real and not about finish historical grievances.

Open source is fostering collaborative environments, while russia as a state is destroying them deliberately. How does that fit together?

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