It is time to fork the linux kernel.   Sadly linux has become the latest casualty of war.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linus-Torvalds-Russian-Devs


No this was necessary to save democracy


He couldn't do anything, nor did he really want to.

Forks won’t protect you. As soon as your project becomes large and significant, you'll have to take into account both the wishes of the authorities and the interests of corporations.


seems like he gave two reasons:

1 - sanctions ( a legal matter )
2 - him being Finnish ( see below )

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_War

those sound like good reasons but your point stands.


To be honest, I didn't understand his inappropriate nationalist remark, especially considering how the Finns are remembered as allies of Nazi Germany.


Yeah I'm not blaming Linus if the gubbmint came down on his ass.  But there must be a fork.


It's not gonna be my project.  I'm only looking to find out whose project it will be, so I can pull from it.


I don't see how taking free contributions from Russian contributors is supporting Russia's political aggression. Unless they were being paid or there's some other law not being mentioned here...

I believe there are some export laws that cover certain types of software, but it isn't as clear to me as he implies it should be.


Holy smokes. His comment at first sounds like he's a rambling deplatformer of anything Russian, justifying it with his nationality but the second part sounds more nuanced. So authorities forced his hands? But he doesn't sound particularly opposed to it neither.


By the way, one of the authors who was removed is a Kazakh (?) living in the US. Apparently, for the Finn, he’s also Russian to some extent. I wouldn’t be surprised if the rest of the "Russians" on the list are Jews and Ukrainians. 🤭


yeah.  boycotting Apple and Tesla is as far as i am willing to go to resist centralization of tech.  there is simply no need for such Borg-level organization and Cultishness as what Apple and Tesla use.  On other hand most of you have transitioned into some kind of communist Utopia that can never work.  I believe in capitalism - i don't believe everything should be free.  I Just think that there should be as much cooperation and collaboration as possible and as little centralization as possible.  Both Windows and Android ecosystems are very rich with diversity and seem to be well run and i am happy to use them.

i do acknowledge that there are security issues and it would be nice to have some kind of backup plan B that security conscious people can use for sensitive stuff like banking, health care, private messaging etc.

but for your mainstream Netflix & Chill use case scenario i don't see anything wrong with Windows and Android.

like in the old days Wall Street bankers would have an iPhone for personal use and Blackberry for professional use.  iPhone was sleeker and Blackberry was more secure.

in other words i don't think alternative tech is supposed to replace mainstream teach - but supplement it for the tiny minority of people who have higher security requirements.

will we some day reach a point where we need to hide ALL information from government, such as what you had for breakfast ?  MAYBE

if we get to that point will it be possible ?  PROBABLY NOT

i mean they will simply make it illegal not to have government installed camera in your kitchen.

i already experienced this when i was briefly imprisoned in a psychiatric ward ( it was a mistake - i was cleared the next day ) ... in the ward for example you could not lock the bathroom / shower from the inside ( or outside ) ... anybody could walk in ( staff as well as both male and female patients ) into the bathroom at any time ... my room also had a glass wall and two cameras ... i had no rights and no privacy, all my belongings were confiscated ... despite not doing anything wrong, not even threatening anybody, all on mere SUSPICION that i may be suicidal because i ended up in emergency room under strange circumstances ( it was just a fluke ) ...

so they took all of my rights, freedoms and privacy away from me ( for about a day ) ostensibly for my own good ... and there is nothing stopping them from doing the same thing for the entire society for all eternity ... Cov1d lockdowns were practice for this ...


the Russians should do the fork.


Here are the 10 Russians removed, ordered by the date of their last commit.  I'd guess the bottom 6 don't matter as they haven't contributed in years:

nikita@trvn.ru					Oct 4, 2024
fancer.lancer@gmail.com			Aug 2, 2024
s.shtylyov@omp.ru				May 20, 2024
ddrokosov@sberdevices.ru		Aug 24,	2023
shc_work@mail.ru				Apr 5, 2021
ink@jurassic.park.msu.ru		Jun 20, 2020
aospan@netup.ru					Jul 25, 2016
serjk@netup.ru					Jul 28, 2015
dushistov@mail.ru				May 15, 2015
xeb@mail.ru						Aug 10, 2012
v.georgiev@metrotek.ru			--


Well, it's hard to trust anyone these days. It’s upsetting to see how the authorities are influencing open source, but I’m not sure if there’s a way to fight it. Even Bitcoin has been affected.


apparently US never declared war against Finland so for you as a Russian they are Nazis but for most people as Americans they are not


Such forks have existed for a long time already.

That’s not the issue. Today, they removed Russian names, and tomorrow they might reject code from, say, a Palestinian or a Syrian. This is all very unhealthy for open source, but it's the reality we live in now, thanks to the U.S. authorities and DEI.


Yeah it sounds like he doesn't want to incriminate himself, as he isn't a lawyer he doesn't want to talk about it.  But he didn't miss the opportunity to express his hatred of Russia.  I would have expected him to be more nuanced about the difference between Russian governmental policy and Russian citizen coders.


i was going to contribute to linux but i have a .ru email account


and my point is that Palestinians and Syrians would be welcome by the Russians

the world has split into NATO and BRICS

if Linus made it clear that he is NATO then there needs to be a BRICS alternative


I guess you'll have to spend the time fishing instead.


Once, I asked a friend of mine from U.S. to list the Axis countries. He mentioned Germany, the USSR, Italy, and Japan.


not surprising.  in America kids do not learn about Soviet Union's role in WW2.  just like in Soviet Union kids never learned about America's role.  it would be too confusing given the Cold War that followed.


It's scary to imagine what would happen if Donald Trump wrote code for Linux.


I assume this would have affected their 501(c)3 status either now or potentially in the future so that's why the lawyers told them to act.


And it's possible that this isn't even a joke. Linux is used in counting voters' ballots.


WTF!
nostr:nevent1qqsqqqqxg8m4l6cnp3h0tuezujcwnksljf2z5vhf7h983rf7rjkcrfcprdmhxue69uhhg6r9vehhyetnwshxummnw3erztnrdakj7q3qacg6thl5psv62405rljzkj8spesceyfz2c32udakc2ak0dmvfeysxpqqqqqqz379l6q


another person intelligent in one field and shit for brains in many others, referring people to msm to save hypocrisy, how revealing


USA has committed plenty of heinous atrocities. Why not remove US devs too?


I suspect if you are part of the empire you must say certain things to not appear confrontational

Btw enjoyed this Finnish movie

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4065552/


World peace 🕊


Apparently it is an executive order from Biden causing the chaos.

I do find it concerning that he made no effort to defend maintainers who weren't exactly no name contributors. He had no issues stating his other political views.

I also hate Russia, but I see no benefit in going along with clipping dedicated FOSS contributors without even acknowledging the absurdity of it.

I can understand the US not wanting people to directly help the Russian government or other enemies, but I don't think FOSS should be a concern. I especially don't think alleged defenders of FOSS should just go along with this sort of treatment for contributors without calling it out as bullshit.


It is time to fork the linux kernel.   Sadly linux has become the latest casualty of war.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linus-Torvalds-Russian-Devs


I mean, there's BSD...

I heard about this earlier. It sucks. But inertia, network effects, all that, it's simply not going to happen. I know I'm not about to replace my desktop systems, VPS providers won't replace their images, most maintainers won't ditch Linux for a contentious fork, and enterprise is not about to retool all their data centers over this.

I do intend to run BSD in VMs though to mess around and see if I can use it. I might, but I doubt it. We shall see.


BSD is great I use OpenBSD it for my firewall.  But I will still use linux too.  I just might need to merge a driver or two from a fork.


I guess stuff like this happens trough overcautious lawyers who don't understand the differences between open source code and products.
Kind of funny though they praise this at the same time: https://image.nostr.build/a9e52592df4c5b7885690a7e622dfc799c1a0381e10aa77b457ef489922939df.jpg


Again anonymous devs win. Monero devs are a good role model here.


Anonymous devs is the answer. Monero operates in a highly adversarial environment for years. Plenty of things to learn from it.


so much for the idealism of open source development bringing the world closer together, cooperating despite differences... not much of that left these days

it's doubtful that this will do anything for security, governments fighting doesn't mean that all civilians in a country are suddenly evil, and government-paid saboteurs won't have a harder time
i mean they'll want to shift the blame anyway and not use mail dot ru

but it makes the lawyers happy, and that's what we do it all for !


I'm not sure that flies if an official regulated entity is involved. For example, a non-profit or something that spearheads a project (as with Linux). Maybe best efforts to collect dev data will suffice, but this is somewhat unchartered territory (for FOSS software) in the US from what I can tell. It may not suffice and anon devs may just get booted anyway.

The best strategy could be to let the regulated arm do what it has to and then use the right to fork for those of us who aren't regulated non-profits or whatever.

I'm honestly not sure how this plays out. Centralized funding is an obvious issue here because that's the attack vector government is using. It isn't practical to go after every single one of us pulling from repos.

I think the result is going to be greater fragmentation, lower quality and less secure software in the long run. Hopefully I'm wrong.

Either way, forking Linux outside the US may help, but so many other US based projects are using it that I just don't think it's practical. The whole thing is goofy.


That is such a dumb move. And a loss of talents for the kernel's development. Linux really needs a new leader.


This is sick!


Almost All the "russians" living in America are kikes hiding behind russian names