/tech/ - Technology

It gets worse: Biden Executive Order 14071, which this move is attempting to comply with, seems to be prohibiting not just the acceptance of code from foreign national contributors but the actual distribution of libre software based on economic sanctions.

https://ofac.treasury.gov/faqs/1185
>IT consultancy and design services include the development and implementation of software, as well as assistance or advice relating to the development and implementation of software, including the supply and installation of bespoke software.
So this is not just an attack on Linux, this is an attack on the GPL and any other free software license directed at US law. The US government is now claiming it has the purview to restrict the distribution of free software.

>>13245
>Torvalds himself is playing along with this enthusiastically because of his own moronic Finnish national politics.

FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK!

Okay then it should be immediately forked. Or the devs should just submit the patches and not be Russian about it.

God dammit the US has to ruin fucking everything.

Okay I read this news and panicked, but the patch appears to be removing developers' names from the MAINTAINERS file, so it's more like they lose being credited for their work and they are no longer in charge of maintaining those files. However their work does not appear to be removed.

Linus's statement is disgusting though, I think I still respect him as a programmer but fucking hell this take is such garbage:

> 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

>>13248
I've considered Linus to be a bulwark against idpol saboteurs for a while, but now it's clear his brain has been colonized by NATO, which may end up being an even worse avenue of sabotage against Linux.

>>13248
I'm wrong, there are code changes in the reverted patch too:

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/patch/?id=c55228220dd33e7627ad9736b6fce4df5

Oh fuck this is bad guys, this is really fucking bad, this breaks the whole premise of free and open source software for me

>>13250
Why would this be done without any debate or discussion or anything? If you guys can find any dev discussion about it PLEASE link it.

>>13246
>So this is not just an attack on Linux, this is an attack on the GPL and any other free software license directed at US law. The US government is now claiming it has the purview to restrict the distribution of free software.
Yes but it mostly sounds like retarded political BS.

Russian coders now submit patches to the Russian linux kernel, and American coders submit patches to the American Linux Kernel. And each side will liberate quality code from the other side and claim it as their own, a bit like technology espionage in the first cold-war, first as a tragedy, then as a farce.
Everybody has to make angry nationalism noises, but in the end it's just technology and the only metric that counts is whether it works or not.

Obviously it's always important to make sure nobody smuggles anything malicious into the code base, but it's not like checking the nationality of somebody tells you anything about code quality.

Eventually everybody will get tired of neocon-brain where people have to pretend that "fighting the enemy" is motivating, and it will get tedious doing all the extra steps for the nationalism rituals. And then this shit goes away again.

>>13247
>Or the devs should just submit the patches and not be Russian about it.
Lol that's the spirit.

>God dammit the US has to ruin fucking everything.
It's mostly self sabotage, like that stunt where they fucked with chips that use the RISC-5 micro-processor instruction set. All of a sudden that was considered Chinesium. It's all bullshit, the RISC-5 foundation is located in Switzerland by the way.

The Chinese went through this phase in the mid 2010s. They quickly figured out that all their customers did not want the special Chinese flavor tech and went back to vanilla tech.

The Chinese have the excuse that they had not done this, and this was a new experience. In the west the national fervor has been done before there is no excuse for being retarded more than once.

>>13249
the thing is NATO is in the process of dissolving because they're alienating Turkey out of the alliance. When the Turks leave NATO will become defunct in Europe and all the EU military alliances will have to be remade. So if that's what's causing this chaos, it seems like fucking shit up on the way out.

>>13250
Are they doing this to destroy the Linux project ?
Is this an attack ?

>>13253
>>13253
The Linux project is AFAIK being explicitly racist and until I have a technical reason to not admit patches from Russians that is going to be my take.

But no, I don't see this as destroying the project, more like gatekeeping it and opening it up to a fork.

A fork would eventually become incompatible with the main project through. So that is absolutely scary when you think of Linux as simply a subsystem that let's you use your compute components in peace.

>>13252
>Russian coders now submit patches to the Russian linux kernel, and American coders submit patches to the American Linux Kernel.
I hope this isn't already the case and they can work around this somehow. Software was never supposed to be political and that's kind of the compromise we had with free and open source licenses like GNU: it is a socialist model of production but it's never explicitly applied to things other than software. That was the social contract that allowed open source to exist under the capitalist mode of production (and explicitly by the licence be exploited for profit). So the fact that there is a western reaction to this development model undermines all future open source development and this deeply affects my life. This is shit. I trusted Linus and he's not even giving a single reason for his behaviour.

The problem with a mess of nationalist forks is that it's going to make Linux much more vulnerable to security exploits. People have been critiquing the always-increasing size of the kernel as an obstacle to reasonable code audits for a while now, but needing to audit multiple different isolated projects is going to become much more of a headache.

More context here (it's sanctions like OP said):

https://lore.kernel.org/all/7ee74c1b5b589619a13c6318c9fbd0d6ac7c334a.camel@HansenPartnership.com/

>>13245
OpenSaucers btfo once again
Really like how our corpwhore mr. Kurwalds've gone on the traditional jewropean kike-seeking rampage in that passage kek

>>13255
>The Linux project is AFAIK being explicitly racist and until I have a technical reason to not admit patches from Russians that is going to be my take.
You have a point that this is prejudice, but it's not really the Linux project that's doing this, apparently there's a strange new law or decree that's making them do this.

>But no, I don't see this as destroying the project, more like gatekeeping it and opening it up to a fork.
>A fork would eventually become incompatible with the main project through. So that is absolutely scary when you think of Linux as simply a subsystem that let's you use your compute components in peace.
I see a potential problem if this becomes some kind of angle to influence personality choices of the project.

However i don't see a fragmentation issue. First of all free-software is already fragmented. It might lead to a situation where there is an international linux fork that collects all the contributions, and downstream from that are the national linux forks that do the compliance dance. Like if the US government is spooked about code contributions from Russians (for irrational reasons like racist prejudice, political bluster or whatever), that means that American hands have to re-implement these code snippets. You don't need identical code to keep compatibility. And the spooky "Russian joojoo" would be "quarantined" in the international fork. I know all of this is pants on head retarded, computer code is basically just applied math which is as close to a pure neutral universal as you can get. There is no specifically Russian way to write code the same way there is no specifically Russian way to count, add and subtract numbers.

There is a decent chance that this shit is just political circus. If they were genuinely concerned about somebody spiking software, they would fund a research project to build sophisticated code review software, that could detect "cloaked malware features". My guess is, there are distinctive patterns in malware-code that can be brute-forced with statistical analysis. I also think there is a path to build AI-code-digestion that you feed your "organic code" and it refactors that code to make it nearly flawless "synthetic code".

Whelp, there it is. Fuck you Linus.

>>13260
Holy fuck you retard kill yourself.

Are we going to have a NATO Linux and a BRICS Linux, a NATO LibreOffice and a BRICS LibreOffice, and so on for every other piece of free software from now on?

>>13268
Yeah none of this makes any sense, operating systems and programs are just tools.
There is no difference between a NATO hammer or a BRICS hammer either, i think this is performative.

I guess that the best thing to do is to figure out how to use this as an opportunity to extract more funding for FOSS development.

>>13268
Honestly yes. If China gets indigenous chips that rival American ones, but Linux doesn't mainline changes for them, then either you will have to manually patch the kernel and build it (which I guess some users are already used to, like Gentoo users, but I haven't had to do this manually on my system in my 15 something years of using Linux, I've only had to rebuild it with different configuration flags) or the kernel will get forked. A fork puts more burden on the maintainers and in general splits the user community so there's a reason it's known as the 'F' word in open source. It's definitely a last-resort option.

Tbh I knew that Linux was in bed with corporations for a long time now, I mean the largest tech companies all run all of their shit on top of open source, so it's not a surprise, but I should have realized sooner that they're not going to be above western control. And I don't see kind of other underground politics-free organization taking over, the job is just to big, involves too many people and industries to skirt the law.

>>13265
Interesting perspective.
He thinks there will be 2 separate software spheres.

A iron software-curtain probably isn't in our favor, because it looks like we might end up on the side with fewer software devs. Maybe not immediately but in the near future.