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Comment by AndyMcConachie | Hacker News Reader

If certain people cannot contribute to the Linux kernel because of a list maintained by the USG then perhaps it's time for Linux kernel development to no longer be dependent on US law.

We should realize this has nothing to do with Russia or the Russian government. This could happen with any country and any group of people. The USG is constantly expanding their sanctions regime. Thus, we need to ask ourselves the obvious question; Who will be next?

What I find perplexing and surprising are the people I see online cheering this on. The people who are happy that the USG is forcing Linux kernel devs to stop working with people. Why are some people so happy for Linus and crew to take orders from the USG's sanctions regime?

Where did the free as in freedom go?

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> If certain people cannot contribute to the Linux kernel because of a list maintained by the USG then perhaps it's time for Linux kernel development to no longer be dependent on US law.

It is not only US-based organizations, but also people living in the US (and US citizens even if they don't live in the US) that have to follow the US law. Even if you set up the coordinating foundation in e.g. Switzerland, many Linux kernel maintainers would still live in US, probably not wanting to move to Switzerland.

Also, Switzerland is becoming less neutral and more EU-aligned. They are following most of the EU sanctions against Russia: https://www.admin.ch/gov/en/start/documentation/media-releas...

So you might have to find a different country than Switzerland. Brazil, Venezuela, Cuba? Of course, the most sure way to avoid needing to abide by sanctions against Russia, would be to set your headquarters in Russia.

Sanctioning russia for invading ukraine isn't exactly an arbitrary power trip. Complying with such sanctions is the morally right thing to do here

First words of the post: «If certain people cannot contribute to the Linux kernel because of a list».

Issue is raised against the specifics (validity, effectiveness, sense) of possible sanctions.

John parks his car blocking your gate. Sanction A: you paint his car mauve. Sanction B: John's cousin is forbidden providing voluntary work. Sanction A and B are very different and some raise debate more than others.

(If you want a more "actual" example - though besides official governmental actions - there have been pressing debates whether athletes holding some passport can can compete in international games.)

- "This could happen with any country and any group of people."

The OFAC SDN list once included the ICC (as diplomatic retaliation for ICC judges investigating US war crimes in Afghanistan),

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-54003527 ("International Criminal Court officials sanctioned by US")

Morality aside, there's about zero legal process behind it: it's just a unilateral power of the executive. Any sitting president can do this to any non-American entity they want.

> If certain people cannot contribute to the Linux kernel

You don't need at all to be an official maintainer to contribute to Linux

> This could happen with any country and any group of people.

And that is why it is a good idea to keep people who want to start a war of conquest out of power. So it doesn’t happen to your country and your people.

> Who will be next?

Whoever decides to murder their neighbhours.

> Whoever decides to murder their neighbhours.

To what extent can most people actually move the needle of their government's actions?

As a thought experiment, consider a world where all Americans are banned from contributing to software projects because of the long and dismal history of US foreign policy - which involves murdering people so far from US borders as to make such murder fundamentally questionable at a national security level. While Americans protested the Vietnam and Iraq wars, these wars took place regardless. So how do you establish collective responsibility?

Does the fact that the protests took place make Americans immune from consequences? Or should it only matter if citizen movements can stop a government? In either case, you would find most of the G-20 responsible for some atrocity or the other.

The tragedy of the Russia situation is that it is a wholly unjust war, which should be penalised, but the logic and apparatus that would penalise it would also penalise most major nations. It is beyond the scope of HN to create a world order that would repair things. But just because the UNSC is broken, need not mean that the open source ecosystem be left to rot as well.

> To what extent can most people actually move the needle of their government's actions?

I’m not unsimpathic to this argument. In wars innocent people gets hurt. Sometimes that means your name is removed from a text file, sometimes it means that your family is blown up in a missile attack. Either way the solution is the same: stop the war and take the troops home.

I’m not going to adress the textbook whataboutism line by line. Generaly i’m easy to convince that a lot more negative consequences should have followed a lot of attrocities. If you think you caught me in some contradiction by selecting examples then you are wrong.

It matters because software projects are border-agnostic. There are people who benefit from code, and people who benefit from having people contribute to code.

You drew the line on who gets to be a part of this, Geopoliticising something ostensibly unpolitical. If you want a rule of law in code, you’ll need more than a framework that only punishes Russia. Otherwise it’s no longer open source, it’s America-source.

For what it’s worth I’d favour a host of military and economic measures against Russia. I think the only way this war stops is with military aid, maybe even intervention. I’m not here to defend Russia. I just don’t see what you expect Russians to do by nuking them from a Linux maintainer list.

It’s a net loss for all of us to keep their coders out of open source. If we’re gonna do that with a logic that somehow spares America but punishes everyone else, then we just create a precedent that makes the whole ecosystem worse for a lot of people with nothing to do with this.

> I just don’t see what you expect Russians to do by nuking them from a Linux maintainer list.

Finding alternative employment with a non-sactioned company would be a start.

i agree that's not an unreasonable ask. but if code is to serve geopolitics, then we'll get a lot more (and tougher) situations like this to grapple with. perhaps it's just that I wish code was left neutral.

I think you're under the false impression that the removals were aimed at specific contributors from specific corporations. Which isn't the case by the way.

Ah yes, I'm waiting for the kernel to remove Israeli contributors any day now. Any contributor with an .il email is literally killing Lebanese children according your logic.

> Any contributor with an .il email is literally killing Lebanese children according your logic.

I did not claimed that any kernel contributor is killing anyone. AndyMcConachie’s comment claimed that “This could happen with any country and any group of people.” As if the country in question was doing nothing and then suddenly bamm they were hit with sanctions. If you don’t see how ridiculous that is then there is nothing we can talk about.

I mean it literally could. Do you think that sanctions are only applied to countries that start wars? China is also under sanctions in some form or another from the US.

I guess the point could've been more precise; that anyone anywhere that isn't aligned with US foreign policy could be hit with a similar ban. I agree that it rules out most of the western hemisphere, but there's a world outside of that

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