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If I understand correctly, this blogger wasn't a maintainer or directly involved, he's just personally upset on behalf of anyone whose feelings were hurt by being accused of being a Russian bot? Or have been "riled up by them"?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In what way is that a compliance reason? On what earth are you putting pressure by removing kudos from a list?
you don't see why having the privileges revoked creates pressure? Well, let me chart it out simply : If you have something you like taken from you, but the captor is deaf to your complaints, you'll complain elsewhere. The concept here being : If the US state department/BIS/whoever won't consider your plight, maybe your own government will -- and given enough complaints perhaps it will direct their foreign policy to b…
Go read discussions in the Russian IT communities [1] [2]. The overwhelming reaction is not "let's go overthrow Putin!", but strong negative reaction, loss of respect, and alienation towards Linus, even across those who explicitly against the war and Putin.
[1]: https://habr.com/ru/news/852962/comments/
[2]: https://www.linux.org.ru/news/linux-general/17766938/page3#c...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In what way is that a compliance reason? On what earth are you putting pressure by removing kudos from a list?
The west has placed sanctions on Russia. This means western institutions will be penalized for doing business with Russia. Therefore, removing Russian contributors is how these institutions comply with the sanction. I’m struggling to understand how this is confusing to you. Sanctions place pressure on rogue governments by limiting access to our markets. We either comply with the sanctions or we get fined or worse.
The US also has active sanctions targeting Huawei, but there is a fair number of people in the maintainers list with Huawei e-mails. Double standards much?
UPD: As expected, downwotes is the only response to those questions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess all the people who downvoted have a based analysis on how removing russians from contribution lists damages the war capacity of Russia and is not categorised under the notion of "propaganda".
Sanctions are an economic tool. They damage the economy, and any impact on the war machine unfold as a consequence of that. Sanctions are a broad stroke. Nobody is claiming removing contributors from a list is striking a blow against the capacity of the red army. That’s asinine.
I think Linus has short temper and there are examples of his remarks that are borderline toxic (or cross the line), but this really isn't one of them. The situation is pretty clear and calmly explained by Linus in the quoted messages. They removed contributors from Russia. The main reason is that they were told by a lawyer that they need to do this due to international sanctions. The secondary reason appears to be th…
Contributors from "non western" countries must realise this and be thankful for the current circumstances, as sad as they are, to bring this fact to light.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sanctions are an economic tool. They damage the economy, and any impact on the war machine unfold as a consequence of that. Sanctions are a broad stroke. Nobody is claiming removing contributors from a list is striking a blow against the capacity of the red army. That’s asinine.
Not allowing unpaid labor of Russian developers in your software project somehow damages the Russian economy?
Edit: upon further reading, it seems that the free labor isn't being completely refused, but rather these peoples' maintainership status has been revoked, apparently because lawyers said it was necessary due to sanctions. So they can still contribute, but now they have to submit their patches through a maintainer just like any other regular contributor. And also apparently, all the people involved aren't just random nerds who happen to live in Russia, but rather are directly employed at Russian companies on the sanction list. So yeah, it kinda sucks, and probably feels like a slap in the face to them, but this is one of the harsh realities of international politics. At least it's not like back in the Soviet days when there was essentially zero contact between scientists and engineers on both sides and they couldn't collaborate on projects like this at all.
So Linux is Linus's project and he is subject to Finnish/EU laws. It's not a global project owned by some global "community". When you take this into consideration, these actions are perfectly reasonable. Any open source project will work similarly. Contributors from "non western" countries must realise this and be thankful for the current circumstances, as sad as they are, to bring this fact to light.
It's possible some intelligence agency has identified backdoors placed by the Russian state and they're using this as an excuse to make larger changes without showing their hand, but in that case I'd say Torvalds has already said too much by even responding to these emails.
As for Linux itself, I'm not entirely sure where its geographical representation is. Torvalds lives in the USA, as a full citizen, the Linux Foundation that sponsors Linux is American, so going by him as project owner would probably mean the project isn't Finnish. It was started and got some major development back in Finland, though, and most contributions are submitted from countries all over the world.
I don't think Finland can make Torvalds do much in terms of kicking out Russian contributions, but the American government could.
Such hardworking Russian bots, wow. They wrote WHOLE 20+ emails in several hours! Linus just dehumanized everyone who dares to disagree with the change and/or ask about why it was done on the 3rd year of the war (an increasingly common way of dealing with opponents, unfortunately). No one even tries to explain why this "compliance" selectively applies to ru emails (oh, look the maintainer has graduated from the Mosco…
> And FYI for the actual innocent bystanders who aren't troll farm accounts - the "various compliance requirements" are not just a US thing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The west has placed sanctions on Russia. This means western institutions will be penalized for doing business with Russia. Therefore, removing Russian contributors is how these institutions comply with the sanction. I’m struggling to understand how this is confusing to you. Sanctions place pressure on rogue governments by limiting access to our markets. We either comply with the sanctions or we get fined or worse.
Why it's done now when no new sweeping sanctions were introduced? Was Linux Foundation "circumventing" sanctions for many-many months? The US also has active sanctions targeting Huawei, but there is a fair number of people in the maintainers list with Huawei e-mails. Double standards much? UPD: As expected, downwotes is the only response to those questions.
But you're just after whataboutism, since Huawei is decoupling from Linux themselves[1]
[1] https://wccftech.com/huawei-harmonyos-next-to-remove-linux-a...