tension on kernel mailing lists continues to grow as a Linux Foundation board member finally replies with a "summary of the legal advice the kernel is operating under" re: enforcing US sanctions
(lore.kernel.org)
from cypherpunks@lemmy.ml to linux@lemmy.ml on 25 Oct 17:10
https://lemmy.ml/post/21777936
from cypherpunks@lemmy.ml to linux@lemmy.ml on 25 Oct 17:10
https://lemmy.ml/post/21777936
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Holy shit that got spicy. I was not expecting a Ukrainian and a Serb to start bickering back and forth while stacking racks over the level of support a country gave to the Nazis in WW2 on a kernel mailing list like they were in the comments here on Lemmy.
I get that tensions are high, and for many people the geopolitical reality is their homes being used as cover on an active front line, but like bro your actual fucking name is attached to these messages. At least I keep my most unhinged shit on a semi-anonymous platform. They need to lock it the fuck up.
Edit - jfc, a few messages later somebody comes in with something along the lines of “Taiwan isn’t a country, it’s part of China. When reunification comes sanctions won’t be appropriate against Chinese entities.” Is Lemmy just a front end for this mailing list and I had no idea this entire time?
.
If you think kernel maintainers are ‘techbros’ then you dont really understand that term
does anyone?
No
if you live in the bay area, youd understand who works in tech, and whose a tech bro, very easily.
Living and working in silicon valley for 20 years and then moving to Austin and then Chicago has shown me the reality of how much of a bubble that the Bay Area is.
Nothing translates and tech bro there has a VERY different meaning outside of it.
I thought you were joking, but yup they actually started quizzing eachother on WW2.
It’s not the end of Linux by any means, but that’s gonna be hard to work together afterwards
Jeeeeez that was a lot. I get the sense that the kernel has worked as well as it has because people saw it as separate from geopolitics and so didnt discuss them…now that politics has wedged its way in I feel like it may have opened that door permanently.
I’m optimistic, since technical arguments can be pretty heated yet they end like this:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouTXff7lvq4
🔥
Geopolitics posters will no longer be contained by petty accusations of “bringing politics into it”, the NATOids have drawn blood. There is no turning back now.
This is not a hot take, it’s the official position of the United States of America and 90% of the population of the world. Those who say Taiwan is its own country are radical fringe separatists.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_China#United_States_pol…
They are not wrong though Taiwan isn’t a country. They have never declared independence their government has never officially given up their claim of being the rightful ruler of China. I have no idea why none of these have not been done.
Because China has always held it would start a full-scale invasion if they ever did. So everyone ignores the elephant and keeps the status quo…
That’s why what Linus said was stupid when he brought WWII into this conversation…
Not even Taiwan claims to be a country though. They claim to be the sole legitimate government of China, hence their actual name, The Republic Of China, and not “republic of taiwan” or some other thing.
While it was true for a long time, I don’t think Taiwan expects to get China back anymore. It’s more not to start WW3 for the last 30+ years
Isn’t that, by definition, calling yourself a country?
Wrong phrasing on my part.
No matter which side you ask, the Republic Of China (ROC) or the People’s Republic of China (PRC) Taiwan isn’t a country, it is a region of the country of China. Saying that Taiwan is a country satisfies neither the ROC nor the PRC’s claims
this is great 🍿🍿🍿
It is not good for the kernel and it’s team to suddenly have to kowtow to Usamerican politics.
The reality is that the Linux Foundation is in the United States, and Linus is a naturalized US citizen who lives in Oregon (at least on Wikipedia). So they both will have to pay attention to avoid transacting business with individuals and companies on the SDN list. That is the law in the United States.
Kreg moved to Europe, last I heard. So at least the heir apparent is in a region with better potential international diplomacy and neutrality.
Inheritance wars wasn’t something on my FOSS list…
Winter is coming
Western Europe has committed to making itself an American dependency. This same thing would eventually repeat there but with different aesthetics.
Would a fork be the solution to avoid having a system that is crucial for people worldwide cease to be a weapon at the hands of merrican politicians?
Would a fork be technically viable if Americans and American businesses can’t participate (because the fork works with SDN entities)? Maybe.
I’m guessing most IoT devices are made in China (or increasingly Southeast Asia), so yes.
I’m afraid that if the sanctions will continue to be a go-to method of dealing with geopolitical rivals, we may end up with a few divergent forks. One for US and “the west” block, one for Chinese comrades with their junior Russian partners, and maybe one for Indian code gurus who don’t like both sides and have capable engineering resources themselves.
Could be. Maybe not a hard fork, if this slap fight can be contained in the driver space. I’d keep an eye on OpenHarmony and OpenKylin.
Thank you for that! I was perplexed since I’ve been in the Linux space for 25 years and I was thinking that I would have to switch to bsd.
If you think BSDs are devoid of drama you’re in for a cold shower…
Switch to OpenBSD if you have to, at least the drama there is super funny
Doesn’t free BSD not allow anyone with a Chinese or Russian sounding name already.
Finally the year of Hurd on the desktop?
Real question: does India contribute anything to the kernel?
Considering that that this idea of making a Linux for the US vs a Linux for “the rest of the world” was what made me ditch Fedora for Debian, it’d be a shame to have it happen to Linux as well. Like, sure, an alternative will emerge, but where does one go while that progresses to be daily-driver? Haiku?
It’ll be at the hands of whatever jurisdiction the forker is in. It’s not like you can escape governments.
brazilian linux fork when?
This kind of thing is the inevitable outcome of US policy to “decouple”, which they are pushing. Take something they nominally control, kick out every designated enemy / enemy collaborator, and then watch as an alternative pops up among the " enemy" and ban its purchase or use.
Sure for not but it we’ll go nowhere. Most of the kernel developers are paid developers it’s not somebody working on it in there free time.
Then they should try to free themselves from it.
And governments should wise up and exempt them from any kind of petty stuff.
In the balance between geopolitical conflicts and Linux, the latter is the petty stuff.
This is not something that needs balance.
And they have quite different kinds of petty:
When Linus gets petty, then there’s a proper rant, somebody gets red in the face (but you don’t get to see the pics), and some news interns can write headlines.
When politicians get petty, then people in foreign countries are killed.
And it can cost you up to 30 years for breaking it. I’d listen to my lawyers too.
What an extremely dangerous place to domicile such an important project.
Maybe it’s time to fork the Linux Foundation and fix those two problems.
Suddenly? Linux entities have always had to follow the rules of the country they exist in. A kernel isn’t a sovereign nation no matter how loud the what-about army becomes.
Wow:
Oleksiy Protas
> P.S. “Don’t feed the trolls” Don’t you worry. Our friend here tried to reply to this message, he did so twice in fact with slightly different wording, but it was full of political rage and tu quoque so I assume he fell victim to the spam filter thanks to you special counter-baiting operation so to speak. That aside, I did a very superficial search and it seems that the original author had already had a pull being rejected on the grounds it was coming straight from his Baikal credentials. It’s a real pity that an apparently very able engineer is just playing pretend despite knowing full well why is it so that LF migh not want to be associated with Baikal in any way.
::: spoiler Serge Semin
What were Linus comments ttat precipitated this?
www.phoronix.com/…/Linus-Torvalds-Russian-Devs
tl;dr: anyone who disagrees is a russian troll or a useful idiot, according to the linux man
No clue how all this shakes out. Not real invested in this ideological/bureaucratic slap fight.
It’s always entertaining when Linus flames off.
Either the death of the Linux Foundation or the exclusion of the Linux foundation from kernel development for at least a few versions. In any case Linus likely used the last of his goodwill in proving he’s more American than any other descriptor.
Ehh. IDK if that would be bad or good for Linux. More choices against the possibility of weaker teams/poorer code. Even if things did fragment for a while, one version likely comes out on top and everyone migrates slowly back together.
Interwebs and tech seems to route around this sort of thing.
It’s better in the long term, free software and the political philosophy behind it is entirely incompatible with American political ideology or geopolitics generally. If everyone can contribute, everyone can benefit. When you start limiting this by arbitrary nonsensical reasoning due to legal obligations you only have because the founder of the foundation has a boner for an idealized America that never existed… Shit gets worse. From this many developers are going to permanently leave Linux development and a few may get petty enough to change their license to prevent use in Linux.
Yah sure the guys who are paid to contribute to Linux are going to leave.
Yes, if enough principaled contributors leave, it’ll no longer make sense for companies to pay for people to contribute.
Sure but tech has only existed during peaceful times. With the world splitting apart you can’t assume it we’ll be the same outcome.
When Linus becomes entertaining is when he is not doing his job properly.
Given how used I am to every statement by a politician or business being this slick, polished, carefully re-drafted beige speech it’s a real contrast to see someone like Torvalds just blasting out their thoughts
.
After Linus’ statement, I can’t be sure any more that Linux is free of NSA code… Sad times…
Just so odd how they went about the whole thing. Such an uncalculated way to do things.
Why not wait until you have all your explanations in order backed by lawyers before doing the release? Why did they shit on the carpet first and then explained their reasons afterwards after lots of horrible attempts at justifications that completely missed the point.
It’s blatantly obvious and non-controversial what they’re doing. That’s why.
Excluding developers because of arbitrary sections issued by the most war mongering country in at least the last 10,000 years is not non-controversial, as it turns out.
Funny fucking thing to say considering why Russia is under sanction.
This isn’t a real comment, is it?
Anyway, the Linux kernel team are not about to fight the US government, particularly not to defend Russia. If you’re so concerned about warmongering then leave Russia. Solves all the problems here. You don’t gotta go to the US, even.
The US sanctions anyone that isn’t under their complete control, it’s not a serious country.
And I’m truly sorry you’re too much of a brainwashed nationalist to understand why free software shouldn’t be affected by petty politics.
Yah ok the US is the most wealthy most powerful country in the world and they are not a serious country. Maybe the rest of the world should stop relying on America for everything. I really hope this starts tech sectors in other countries but somehow I don’t think it well. Besides China who is still reliant on American companies.
China is divesting as quickly as possible from the US as they’ve overtaken the use in GDP
other countries rely on the US because the US uses military intervention and economic sanctions to ensure everyone has to rely on them. this is not difficult to understand
Jackass says most war mongering ignoring the actual country invading another.
Typical.
I’m sorry, even if you go back to the original Russian empire, no entity or arbitrary collection of entities containing a “Russia” has invaded more countries or killed more civilians than the US.
That’s the plain fact of the matter. Invading more than 70 countries does that.
Russia bad, the US is and will always be worse.
Jackass forgets that the US invaded and occupied another country for most of the 21st century.
Typical.
That’s Linus for you. He’s extremely misanthropic. This isn’t his first PR fuck up. Except this time his abrasiveness triggered an international incident.
You mean like SELinux or other existing contributions to the linux kernel?
Dude, it’s common knowledge that NSA has contributed significant portions of (security related) code to the kernel. No tin foil hat required.
They also tried to put weak encryption in the kernel once.
I’m convinced that they did it under the radar.
Well it’s open source so you can check.
Getting whiplash between “haha Russian invaders and bots get fucked!!! Finland!!! Wooooo Finland!!!” and “ah, we take no pleasure in doing this, our hands are tied”
Maybe the professional communications and Mastodon bubble Linus has been posting in led him to believe everyone in the world hates Russians now and that would be really well received
Theodore T’so especially:
first comment:
next comment:
I mean, if Linus had given a more professional commentary, this whole drama definitely wouldn’t be so loud, but we have what we have.
That applies to most of the drama surrounding Linux.
It would probably be more controversial if Linus had given more professional commentary.
Damn there are a surprising number of maintainers that are comrades and not taking this lying down from the western supremacist cohort.
Linus opened up a massive can of worms and turned this into a geopolitical conflict by acting like a baby.
This comment by Hantong Chen is great:
Meh, if they really leave this will prompt the US government or corps to finally start paying these developers. This flare up is a blessing in disguise.
Wait until you find out how much of Linux the NSA has built.
Next to none. You’re just spreading FUD.
selinux is one example.
They haven’t been involved with that for years and it’s open source so it’s as likely to have a backdoor as any other part of the code.
The NSA also created TOR
Wasn’t Huawei trying to put a Backdoor into linux?
If yes, I see why they finally want to restrict maintainers to countries they can trust
as far as i know, that has not happened.
what makes you think it did?
.
Articles back in the days.
I found a random one now. Maybe I got just clickbaited with titles back then. I dunno
securityboulevard.com/…/was-this-huaweis-failed-a…
Funny that blog calls it a “failed attempt at a backdoor” while neglecting to mention that the grsec post (which it does link to and acknowledges is the source of the story) had been updated months prior to explicitly refute that characterization:
Damn, I have been thinking bad about them for too long for shitty journalism
Someone has forked Linux github.com/Cqinux/cinux
Doesn't Linux already have a bunch of forks? I'm using the CachyOS kernel, for example
That’s true, but how much hard-forks do you know?
Relevant, maintained? Zero.
At least one for each manufacturer that uses it under the hood in a Tivo-like manner
I can’t take that seriously
Yeah a dozen or so commits updating readme files isn’t exactly compelling stuff. Any of us could do this in five minutes on GitHub.
Still hosted on GitHub, a property of MicroSoft.
That’s because it’s pure bullshit. And this repo will be deleted or abandoned in a month.
🤣🤣🤣
Any bets on how likely that this is even maintained six months from now?
Six months don’t even give it a month. I don’t think most people want to admit how many kernel devs are paid devs. Nobody is doing all this work for free people need a home and food.
This will be a nothing burger in 6 months