Linus Torvalds affirms expulsion of Russian maintainers

fuck russians? fuck the Russian government and the people who support it, not all the russians.
- "fuck the overwhelming majority of russians" doesn't have the same ring to it.
- This.
I have no problem with Russians, but I do have a problem with the Russian government, and that makes me suspect Russians due to the chance of the Russian government using its leverage to get them to do what they want. So I understand the move, but I'm saddened that FOSS gets sucked into international politics.
- FOSS is inherently political, though, and an international collaboration like Linux is inherently internationally political. Allowing big corporations to influence the direction of the codebase? That's political. Allowing the free usage and distribution of the software to anybody for any purpose not otherwise afforded by existing copyright law? That's political. Collaborating with contributors from almost every country on Earth? That's political. Being headquartered in the United States? Again political. Creating a hierarchy with Linus Torvalds at the top? The definition of politics.
  It feels like people only start screaming "that's politics though!" whenever it becomes political in a way that's controversial to them – without recognizing how completely pervasive politics are in every single aspect of our lives. The fact we're even talking on Lemmy right now is political – in all likelihood, we both decided that Reddit's system of governance was unfair and thought a federated system was somehow more ideal, in this case a platform created by outspoken authcoms. That's even disregarding the Internet which Lemmy sits on top of, including net neutrality, freedom of speech, the infrastructure connecting different jurisdictions, the way it came about through organizations like DARPA, CERN, the IEEE, and ICANN, etc.
fuck russians.
this is racism and bigotry
- "Russian" is not an ethnicity to claim racism against.

He didn't expel all Russians, just the ones working for sanctioned Russian companies.

https://social.kernel.org/notice/AnIv3IogdUsebImO6i

Important context and a good decision
That would've been great for them to clarify earlier XD
- That would've generated fewer clicks. Sensationalism is always more profitable.
- Well, this is The Register. Not exactly a paragon of stellar reporting here.
- RIGHT?? I was so disappointed until I learned that bit of context. Even the original article I read about it didn't mention it
Good! So why the incendiary comments Linus made on Russians. It is so hard to say something like this: "I have to expel them from the project due to a US law forced us to do it. However, I had trust on them all these years and they contributed a lot to the project (that is why they were working here). Now, I am against the law because we should not discriminate people for the origin. Moreover, the claim that they can harm the software is unwarranted because it is OPEN and many eyes are on it. Finally, this harms the entire Linux project because now makes it an "American"project rather than an global one. Sad times."
- Have you noticed exactly how many Russians are bigots who support the mass murder of their neighbors?
- xz attack was an open source attack and it would be silly to assume that it was unique.
- I am also against Russian aggression on Ukraine! But would no ban any Russian because of that. The same I am completely against US occupying Iraq and 1/3 of Syria, yet never would occur to me not to hire an American because what their country does. I really don't understand why is so hard to understand for Lemmy community the double standard.
Some people would disagree with you https://lwn.net/Articles/995294/
- Your own link 1) does not attest to that and 2) has a comment replying to it directly contradicting what it's saying in the first place.

I think given the current political situation this is the right call. No one knows what the Russian government might compel otherwise innocent devs to do.

That said, we (and I mean society, not any particular individual) should be mindful that we don’t slip into bigotry.

I’ve worked side by side with RU devs who were both personable and damned competent. Never were their tech skills in doubt, and I retain quite a bit of respect for those individuals.
I’d not do the same today explicitly because of the political and compliance implications. It’s unfortunate, but necessary.
- Again, with open software that is not necessary... If we get to believe that argument, those potential "FSB" coders would be the ones who would notice if the CIA was trying to place a back door in the kernel too. Open Software is OPEN!!
- i wish there was more we could do to help russians topple their dictatorship
- Necessary for what?
Linux Fundarion is based in America. It needs to follow its rules and politics. I guess a lot of things will happen after this. As something so important for open technology like It , should be based in a more open, mor asvanced in laws and neutral territory.
- Linus is from Finland. Not hard to remember reasons for aversion to Russian propaganda for anyone raised near it.
  Blanketing the Linux Foundation as American based kind of sounds like you're a Russian troll.
- This is hardly the first time the core Linux code stack has been forked and independently developed. Seems like this is going to invite a Russia-specific development environment that just pulls in updates from the main branch and adds in Russia-internal development (which will likely then be copied by non-Russians and backloaded into the core Linux stack under someone else's name, because why waste good dev work?)
  But the argument appears to be anyone with a Russian-sounding name is getting removed from the core development team, until they can prove to the American team that they aren't... spooks, I guess? Also
  The driver code to which the dropped maintainers contributed remains in place.
  So this isn't such a high security risk that the code is being pulled (presumably because its been vetted and appears beyond repute). This is purely a CYA move to eliminate veterans on the team because they were forthright about their identities.
  should be based in a more open, mor asvanced in laws and neutral territory.
  Its not clear how a policy of booting people based on their surnames accomplishes this.
With that logic, the US contributes should be expelled too. We have more examples of US folks being served NSLs than Russians.
- Its an American-based venture, owned and operated by American businessmen. They're not going to burn their own guys, even if some of them are spooks (no evidence that anyone on the core dev team is a spook, but crazy to think the FSB would have people in and the Five-Eyes guys wouldn't).
  I do wonder how long until we start seeing mainstream code-forks that span geopolitical regions. Will we have a Digital Iron Curtain, with BRICS countries doing their own FOSS branches independently of NATO block?
- Looking at the downvotes, signals some true on you comment!
- Lol because russian is so open about who they give nsl to. Or they just poison/defenestrate them
What current situation?
Is so hard to believe Open Source should be open? If there were a malicious intent, others would have been able to detect it in no time… because it is ‘open’! If the open system works, it should not matter there are CIA or FSB, commies or libertarians “infiltrated” making the code.
If those Russians had been in that position is because their contributions have been stellar, otherwise they would never have gotten there. Their contribution and effort has been robbed from them just because they mothers give them birth in the wrong coordinates.
Linus is a god for many of us… with human traits though... His Finland, although historically robbed by Russia, achieved its highest splendor during the decades of neutrality, not by fiercely antagonizing one or the other power… same as Switzerland, Ireland, Austria and Singapore.
All this started with a US law so he has to comply with. However, instead of those unhelpful comments, he should say that in open software it is unwarranted… not to mention countries can get sanctions for their actions, but not civilians that cannot choose where they are born.
If we are to believe that Moscow is trying to put something into the kernel “undetected”… gosh, what an organization based on the US with a so pro-establishment leader may be doing so? For real, now I am starting having my doubts on the kernel!
- My very fist post on lemmy and already see the upvote downvote game... When someone votes should be demanded a public reason, no?
Not gonna lie, this is kinda a refutation of the whole open source model. I was led to believe that it shouldn't matter who writes the code, as long the code is able to be interrogated/corrected.
Isn’t most of Linux open source?
- All of it is. But its still possible to sneak backdoors into Foss software (though magnitudes harder). See xz.
The current ceo of usa is supporting a genocide in gaza and the former ceo is a fascist. Does the same logic apply here?
- I think pressure should be put on the US to divest from genocide. Sanctions from our allies would be helpful... Surely with the international court declaring Israel's actions a war crime it is easy to make a case for it.
  Our election system has fucked over anti-zionists and needs reforming, which is happening, but not by this November.
  Ranked choice voting is gaining popularity, electoral college is under pressure and people are fed up with voter suppression and gerrymandering and things are moving in a positive direction on the local and state levels.

Linus is from Finland. Finns barely tolerate Russians under usual circumstances. These are not usual circumstances.

True he could have banned them long ago, it's his project in the end, but he didn't, he only did it after the sanctions
It is genuine xenophobia. I like in Poland, and its like you're either a homophobe, or a xenophobe- with pretty limited inbetween. (And there are plenty of people who are both)
- And Russians are peaceophobes? 😆
If he did that that would have been genuine discrimination. If he has to do it now because of sanctions, then ok fine. But otherwise I don't want to see an open source project treating people differently based on where they were born.
Come on lemmy, how is this pro-racism comment upvoted so many times? Please, think.
- "Russian" is not a race.
Sound like they are racists to me
- I mean, that's like calling a Native American racist for disliking European (white) Americans. Like sure, technically, but aren't there some underlying issues at play that make the feeling more justified.

Absolutely based as fuck as usual.

Good cleanup on the security vulnerabilities!

Honestly, that's the main thing I was thinking.
- Anyone wanting to put vulnerabilities into Linux is probably capable of not looking like they are in Russia...

To directly quote Linus:

Ok, lots of Russian trolls out and about.

It's entirely clear why the change was done, it's not getting reverted, and using multiple random anonymous accounts to try to "grass root" it by Russian troll factories isn't going to change anything.

And FYI for the actual innocent bystanders who aren't troll farm accounts - the "various compliance requirements" are not just a US thing.

If you haven't heard of Russian sanctions yet, you should try to read the news some day. And by "news", I don't mean Russian state-sponsored spam.

As to sending me a revert patch - please use whatever mush you call brains. I'm Finnish. Did you think I'd be supporting Russian aggression? Apparently it's not just lack of real news, it's lack of history knowledge too.

Linus really pouring on that "white death" energy.

It's really awesome to expel by nationality, even including people who've long moved out and immigrated years ago and don't support the invasion and war waged on Ukraine /s

Honestly fuck Russia ofc, but this goes a bit too far into the grey area between hawkish-reasonable and discriminatory, and on the latter side I'm not sure who and/or what this is meant to help, nor does it seem particularly fair to those individual contributors to keep their code yet remove attribution and mailing list entries.

EDIT: holy shit the bloodlust in the comments here is actually unreal, even on arr slash neoliberal and the politics communities here on lemmy the comments are way more sane.

Why are people so fundamentally incapable of nuanced judgement. According to people in this comment section, a human is entirely defined by their country of origin. What is this witch hunt level, toddler IQ thinking. Are people really so desperate to have a "bad guy" that they can blame everything on? This dehumanization of people is wild to me.
- a human is entirely defined by their country of origin
  This reeks of Americanism, yanks are absurdly obsessed with race and nationality
- a human is entirely defined by their country of origin
  That's missing a big part of the justification here. When you're from a given country, that country frequently has a lot of influence over you. You probably have family and other ties in your home country, and those can be used as leverage to get you to do what the state wants. And when your country is in active opposition to a large portion of the free world, it makes a lot of sense for people to be extra cautious in who they deal with, because it's never clear if that person is being manipulated by their former state.
  So excluding someone based on nationality can absolutely make sense as an easy rule of thumb to avoid most of the problems stemming from that state.
- Yeah. Times like this I wonder whether a better world is even really possible, or whether social liberalisation was but a blip on a trajectory of bigotry, antagonism, tribalism and savagery.
  Even in harmless contexts, the commodification of national identity as the first and foremost trait of a person even for the purposes of smalltalk or jest always makes me think if perhaps most are far more nationalist than they'd care to admit or even themselves think. It's a haunting thought.
- Because as long as the Russian state exists and can point to their "history" as an empire and use it as an excuse to take over their neighboring countries (like Latvia, the place where I'm from), I won't be satisfied.
  Unfortunately nobody is bombing Moscow yet, so anything that isolates and makes the population more angry and can hopefully topple the government is a good thing in my book
It's disappointing behavior by Linus. It's understandable that sanctions could force the removal of people just for being Russia.
His reply however shows he personally is in favor of removing people just for being Russian.
I wonder if any of the people who pressured him to take some time off for being a "jerk" will give a shit for this response.
keep their code yet remove attribution
Isn't that a violation of the GPL?
Russia represent Russian citizens the same way the US represent US citizens. If you're an US citizen and you think US international actions look bad on you then tough luck. Being a citizen of a specific state comes with its own responsibilities and consequences. If Russian nationals have long moved out of Russia and migrated elsewhere and don't support anything Russia does, why are they still Russian citizens? If they don't want to get sanctioned and they've long migrated from Russia they should apply for citizenship elsewhere. If they choose to stay Russian citizens that's on them.
As for nationality vs citizenship. Nationality is too vague of a term because it can mean both citizen of a state and originating from said state. I'm pretty sure in this case the discussion is about people who are Russian citizens, not people who originate from Russia but are no longer associated with them. Using nationality only muddies the discussion.
- Congratulation, you are part of the problem!
- If they don't want to get sanctioned and they've long migrated from Russia they should apply for citizenship elsewhere
  Have you ever thought about doing this yourself? Don't have to go far to figure that it takes at least 5 years of hard work in most cases, if possible at all. Citizenship unfortunately isn't something you can acquire or renounce at will. Not without being obscenely rich, that is.
- I maintain US citizenship as the only biological child of my parents in case I need to be there for them due to an emergency or, later, end-of-life care. I cannot move them to Japan nor would they want to.
- Russia represent Russian citizens the same way the US represent US citizens.
  Lolwut. Russia isn't even a democracy.
  If you're an US citizen and you think US international actions look bad on you then tough luck.
  You really think Joe Schmoe Ignoramus from Shaboygan, Wisconsin just trying to buy gas is to be held responsible for the civilian deaths in Palestine? War in Iraq? Unhinged.
  Being a citizen of a specific state comes with its own responsibilities and consequences.
  No, because being a citizen of a state is not a choice. You are born where you're born.
  If Russian nationals have long moved out of Russia and migrated elsewhere and don't support anything Russia does, why are they still Russian citizens?
  Because they may have family (e.g. elderly parents that require care) there and prospects of being able to visit otherwise aren't great.
  If they choose to stay Russian citizens that's on them.
  But that's besides the fact actually getting a citizenship in another country is very very difficult. I've been in the UK for like 15 years, since 10 or so years old, and only just barely eligible now, gonna take another 2 years if not more to go through the process.
  Your entire comment is "Tell me you're a westerner without the least bit of awareness of how immigration works without telling me." basically, living happily with a golden US passport or in the Schengen, not how it works for the majority of the world, or there'd be no one left in the global south.
  Nationality is too vague of a term because it can mean both citizen of a state and originating from said state.
  No it really can't.
  Nationality is the legal status of belonging to a particular nation, defined as a group of people organized in one country, under one legal jurisdiction, or as a group of people who are united on the basis of culture.
  In international law, nationality is a legal identification establishing the person as a subject, a national, of a sovereign state. It affords the state jurisdiction over the person and affords the person the protection of the state against other states.
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationality
- Nah, that honor definitely goes to lemmy.ml
Have you ever wondered if a russian can get a non .ru domain, and still collaborate? .ru and .su tlds are directly controlled by the Russian state
- One of the mainrainers had a gmail.
- Yeah for sure. If that's the basis then just block those domains. Unless I misunderstood, which is totally possible, it doesn't seem like that's the entire extent of the block.

How is this keeping to open source philosophies in any way?

“No, you can’t work on this, you’re Russian.”

I don’t support the Russian Government or its actions in any way, but these devs are probably not part of it. They maintain drivers for fucking ASUS hardware.

Because there are both US and EU laws preventing code from countries deemed a threat. Torvalds is paid by the Ameircan Linux Foundation, which has to work under US law and he himself is an EU citizen. Also a lot of other developers are from those countries and if they do not comply, they could get into some pretty bad legal trouble.
So it pretty much boils down to kick out the Russians or kick out all US and EU citizens and well we see Linus choice.
- risc-v saw this coming a while ago and moved to Switzerland to avoid it.
- That's the start, of course. One could always play good cop, bad cop: "I have to do this to comply with the law, sorry, there's nothing else I can do." What Linus has done here is play bad cop, bad cop: "the law says I have to obey sanctions, and by the way I support the sanctions and this move anyway."
- It's not that hard of a choice either ofc, given one is essentially required.
- Do you also know Finland is next to russia and it does not have to be US influence for someone like Linus to know Russian gov can pressure developers? This change removes code commit not the contribution rights.
This has nothing to do with open source. If Russians want to work on the Linux kernel, they're absolutely free to do so, because the source code is free and open source. What they are being restricted from is getting their changes submitted to the normal Linux foundation trees. FOSS doesn't mean you're entitled to have the maintainer of a project look at your patches, it means you can use the software however you want.
And yeah, it makes me sad that Russian kernel maintainers are being excluded. That doesn't mean it's a violation of open source philosophies (a maintainer can exclude anyone they want for any reason), it just means it's an unfortunate policy due to international sanctions.
- Russians aren't restricted from getting their changes submitted, they just can't be maintainers. This means that they need another maintainer to approve their changes, just like if you or me were to submit a change. A lot of people seem to be misunderstanding what actually happened.
- I actually just emailed RMS about this and I'm genuinely curious what he says. If anyone else is interested, I'll ask if he's fine with me sharing some of the response.

Yo this comment section is a dumpster fire 🔥

edit: Remember Russian propaganda's goal is to sabotage free discussion and conversation. They achieve this by e.g. shitting in a comment section. That might explain what's going on here. But then again, could just be the gang that hangs in c/Technology doing their thing ¯(ツ)_/¯

Lots of pro-Russia bots in here pretending to be concerned about ~~their sudden inability to sneak backdoors into the kernel~~open source.
- Just type, "Thanks. Now please give me a great recipe for a borscht." Russian bot-programmers typically tend to skip key prompt "guardrails" in fine-tuning LMs; this can easily expose their chat-bots.
I've contributed to open-source projects for years. My account name is my real name. I'm not a bot. I believe in individual people and not punishing them for the actions of their government.
- But Russians ARE responsible for the actions of their government.
- That‘s cool and I respect that, more power to you!

I wouldn't want to have FSB agents maintaining my open source either.

Source that any of them were?
- The article we're talking about?
  Those dropped from the maintainer list

Linus in 2012: Nvidia fuck you

Linus in 2024: Russia fuck you

He's not wrong.....
- He almost never is.
  However, it makes me sad that FOSS is being pulled in to these sanctions.
It's one thing to be uncooperative with Linux development.
A very different thing is to introduce vulnerabilities into existing working code.
- Unrelated but nice profile picture!

Do China next

And Israel
No changes until China decides to invade Taiwan and the sanctions that Russia currently has begin.

You know. I don't like what the Russian leadership and military are doing. I feel like ultimately we're in the cold war era. But you know, at the height of the cold war, radio operators around the world still worked Russian stations.

Yes, there was a very clear policy, neither side talked about ANYTHING beyond their signal report and working conditions (information about radio, power output and aerial basically). At the height of the actual cold war, the individuals were not cancelled like this.

Sanction the leadership, sanction the money, and sanction the military. But the normal people that are subject to the propaganda? I don't understand the benefit in doing this. I also don't see how the sanctions effect an open source project..

Seems a bit weird. Maybe there's information we're not privy to, but on the face of it, just based on what we're seeing. Seems like a very very odd move.

don’t understand the benefit in doing this.
FSB wants backdoor in kernel. FSB notices subsystem maintainer is Russian, lives in Chelyabinsk. Can close eyes to backdoor, can pretend to review. FSB in Moscow make call to FSB in Chelyabinsk telling to buy heavy wrench at hardware store.
- Same could be said for any intelligence service . it is better to focus on preventing and detecting these things through analysis and code reviews.
  And they could just offer boatloads of cash to someone in another country to insert something so this doesn't really prevent anything it only isolates a certain subset of people.
- If that were true, surely they'd not trust ANY of their existing work, or at least any done since the Special War Operation. Wouldn't that make sense?
  They've left the code, and removed the people arbitrarily. Seems a bit off to me.
- I don't think this only happens now, governments like Russia, USA, China, Israel will likely always be making these attempts.
I don't understand the benefit in doing this.
Security. Torvalds did this for security.
Is it really that hard to parse?
- And I'll say the same here as I did above. If it was for security, their code is tainted too. It's an arbitrary reaction that is not complete as a solution to anything.
I am on your side and don't understand the fury of down votes in this section regarding this stance. I am from a shit hole of a country too and if my life long contribution to open science (hypothetically speaking) could be so completely disregarded because of something ultra shitty that my country did, I would be super sad and probably mad at the OS community for leaving me behind so quickly.
I also don't understand the benefit of doing this. Most people seem to claim it's for security reasons but that does not make sense to me. Closing doors to someone without any proof of malintent is so against open source philosophy that it is perhaps more damaging in its core. And being the kind of government Russia is (or for that matter Israel, China, USA etc etc) they will always try to gain cyber war advantage by such methods. This approach is therefore clearly unsustainable. You would only be able to give dev access to a handful of countries in the world.
It sure as hell won't scratch a dent in the Russian government's armor when all these sanctions did not. It is not going to achieve 1/1000th of what all those ambargoes, frozen accounts etc aimed and failed to achieve.
Therefore there is either missing information (external pressure to take this action) or this is simply an action based on personal judgement.
- Therefore there is either missing information (external pressure to take this action) or this is simply an action based on personal judgement.
  Looking at the other post about NVidia drivers, I am starting to wonder if western governments (or perhaps just the US) are going after large orgs and suggesting how current sanctions should be interpreted. In which case, not sure I can then blame the Linux foundation, since you know, you don't need government heavy breathing down your neck.

I'm surprised how many people treat GPL to ignore borders. The IP law still operates only by the rules your country decides.

I can understand the desire for information to be free, but unless Open source movement becomes it's own country the discussion should end there.

Nobody says to ignore the law... it is Linus comments that were bad. Instead of defending the people that was working for him all these years and he had trust on them, he decided to throw them under the bus because he is from Finland. Well, Finland prospered the most on its life under neutrality.
- Well I guess if he trusts them, he will welcome in open arms once the sanctions are lifted. Or if they get a non russian state domain to operate from.
I can understand the desire for information to be free, but unless Open source movement becomes it’s own country the discussion should end there.
Ideally the internet would be extra-sovereign
- hear hear!
Did they get paid?
Edit: Very likely they were paid, and that's where IP addresses end and sanctions begin.
Every worker within an organization has to be paid, somehow.
Somebody must bear the costs of the supposedly “free (gratis).” In the end, nothing is truly free cost. And, not a single person would work for free (no payment, compensation, or benefits, or in other words, gratis) full-time.
It is an absurdity to think otherwise.
Free and open-source software is handed out at zero-cost to make it possible to lower the barrier of entrance; to make it as widely available as possible. Knowledge should, indeed, be free (gratis).
https://medium.com/@uriadonayherrera/economics-in-foss-is-paying-for-free-and-open-source-software-an-investment-or-an-expense-19f187db8d5a
- Explain volunteers then.

You have to be arguing in bad faith if you’re trying to say “citizens of nation shouldn’t be responsible for their nation”

The open source benefit is not that they can directly impact it, it’s that their government can’t

If it was framed as a measure against possible government coordinated infiltration, sure. But that's not the case.
You have to be arguing in bad faith if you’re trying to say “citizens of nation shouldn’t be responsible for their nation”
I say that in good faith
it’s that their government can’t
Then take action against specific people if you see that happening.

Just goes to show that even a legend can act like an idiot.

Like not risking his lifelyhood to fight US and EU sanctions against a genocidal regime?
- Exactly. He obviously isn't the one pushing for this, because if he was, he would've done it when the war started (or even before). That said, as a Finn, he doesn't have any reason to stand up for Russians, so when legal push comes to shove, there's not a good argument for him pushing back.
- I agree with the person you're replying to in the sense that Linus's decision is OK, but the delivery could be less "idiotic". This could be a different message entirely. Even a cold "Yes we have some things happening. Can't tell more for now" would've been fine.
  I'm Finnish. Did you think I'd be supporting Russian aggression?
  Where did that come from? Sir this is a kernel mailing list. Why the nationality chest beating? I'm Polish and I have a smirk all day on November 4 but it's just so childish from Linus.
I mean he’s legally obligated to, not really a choice. He can say screw it, but then he opens himself up to legal troubles.
He makes a habit of that tbh (See tivoization, etc)

russian economy after over 1k days of war is evaporized and putin now is Xis little dog. so if we all work together now nobody will remember a country called russia in 100 years. nations are just a phantasy and it wont hurt to let go of some.

The Russian economy after over 1k days of war ~~is evaporized~~ has evaporated and now Putin is Xi's little dog. so If we all work together, nobody will remember a country called Russia in 100 years. Nations are just a ~~phantasy~~ fantasy, and it won't hurt to let go of some.
I think it's scary that the Russian Federation will probably "Balkanize" if Ukraine won't capitulate, and with how many nuclear weapons it has, that's terrifying to consider.
Then again, they probably don't work very well given what we've seen about the performance of the so-called "2nd/3rd most powerful army on Earth". But even a few potentially in the hands of an even more unhinged maniac than Putin is unsettling, to say the least.
- well the fall of the udssr was a joy so i expect part 2 to be great aswell. from what i understand the russians also want to buy mcdonalds, iphone and porsche and not live gulag life. when hitler was dead all of a sudden my fellow germans werent into nazi shit much. once putin gets to eat bullets chances are good russians lose interest in killing their neighbours. stupid russians.
- I wonder what the secret baltic/polish/sauce is that they improved so fast after the fall of the wall?
  Why are moldova/ukraine/belarus struggling.
  As you mention, the balkans haven't experienced the same rate of improvement after the fall of the ottomans.

The whole Grad is seething I'm loving it.

So the Rest of the world should trust CIA, NSA contributions but not Russia's FSB ? come on , opensource should be tolerant towards all espionage agencies no matter their skin color.

- don't be pedantic, what about the Chinese, south-Africans, north-Koreans, Cubans, ..etc
No, they don't.
Replying because I need to think about how I'm going to vote for this comment and plan to come back later.

Absolutely idiotic take that endangers not only Linux but fractures the concept of open source itself.

Was worth it just to see you morons fume
Go look at the principles of open-source or free software as defined either by the OSI and the FSF and then come back when you find the one that says that Linus needs to violate US sanctions to keep employees of Russian companies in trusted roles within his project.

Good

Who's boot? Linus's or Putin's? I'm assuming you're on Russia's side by your instance. It's weird how constituent you people are. Literally anything, you're defending Russia. If the US was invading a sovereign nation to take it under its influence, I'm sure you'd be against that. As would I, because I'm morally consistent. You somehow justify Russia's actions yet are against the west expanding and exerting their influence. Care to enlighten me to the difference?
And before you answer: no, Ukraine is not part of Russia and did not start the invasion. Even under the USSR it wasn't part of Russia. It was a member state of a union of states, as the name implies. Russia does not have any right to it.

Don't know the whole story but :

If you banned them because they are promoting the Russia, it's okay. But it's not if you banned them ONLY because they're Russians. But maybe you could like said to them to do like in the sports, and operate as a "no-country" people, but surely not ban them for their nationality

I thought it said expulsion of Russian Mountaineers so that was pretty confusing

It's really such a shame that the mountaineers always take so much credit when the Linux sherpas do so much of the work.

Looks like it is about time for a hard fork maintained outside NATO countries.

Don't know how feasible is a fork of the kernel, but if given a choice, I would choose the distro with the kernel that does not ban people from any nationality every time.
Go and do it then.
Just because Russians can't approve commits anymore?

Is the existence of sanctions a slippery slope to Japanese internment camps?
The point of sanctions is to make it harder to run a country, part of that is making the citizens angry with the government
They don't target Russians outside of Russia, and do target non-Russians in Russia, because they're meant to actually be somewhat effective rather than just inciting hate

SELinux from NSA is evil. Got it.

I don't think that's what they were saying, but I don't think you're making that point in good faith either.

I really hope this thread is filled with bots because otherwise you have really hit the bottom. The thread is filled with racism and bigotry, and it's allowed only because it's against russians...

Maybe you can provide an example?
- Imagine a thread filled with people insulting brazilians
Explain
Join your Russian comrades on the front and bring every single MAGAT with you. The NATO and Ukrainian tungsten will greet you.
- you sound like a racist, perhaps you should join them

altlinux devs:
oh come on we are not trolls

Maintainers is a unnecessarily nice word for trolls.

He obviously meant the people commenting online, not the maintainers
- ? The maintainers are being banned