US Government Bans Linux Foundation from Doing Business with Tencent, Huawei [video]

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28 points·jarsin··6 comments

There's risk that the kernel will get forked and the fork becomes dominant, subverting the power of the linux foundation.

There's probably more linux users in China than the US, perhaps even more than US+EU.

Not as many developers though, yet.

The tldr version. US House bill HR 5009 was just signed into law. It's your typical monster appropriations bill for the Defense department. The section of interest is s.851 which prohibits DoD from contracting with entities that themselves use lobbyists for the Chinese government (which means Huawei, say).

I don't make the logical leap that this means that Linux is unusable by DoD unless the Linux Foundation ejects Huawei from the board. DoD would be buying from RedHat or even more indirectly from Lockheed or whatever, not the Linux Foundation.

everyone associating Linux or the kernel, with the sleazy Linux foundation, it's wrong.

they do donate some build servers and pay some of a summit. but that's about it. it barely offsets the corporate shilling distracting actual Linux development they cause.

Anyone that watched the video, want to give a TL;DW?

Tencent and Huawei both have board members on the Linux Foundation. They will be forced to kick them off the board if they want to keep doing business with any company that also does business with US government. Essentially every big tech company does business with the US government.

Additionally, Linux may have to remove all contributors associated with Chinese companies on this list. Like they recently did with all Russian contributors.

A lot of other companies are entwined with Tencent and Huawei such as Epic Games, Riot, Discord, etc.

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