I for one am going through quite a culture shock. I always assumed the nature of FOSS software made it immune to be confined within the policies of nations; I guess if one day the government of USA starts to think that its a security concers for china to use and contribute to core opensource software created by its citizens or based in their boundaries, they might strongarm FOSS communities and projects to make their software exclude them in someway or worse declare GPL software a threat to national security.
Nope. Politics is part of being open source.
As for US strong arming you don’t have to be a US company for them to do that. RISK-V and ASML have been targeted by them in the past to prevent Chinese use.
RISK-V and ASML have been targeted by them in the past to prevent Chinese use.
reading the broad points regarding RISC-V, I think my worst case scenario is apparently just the present day.
i’ve been contributing to open source for a year or so now and i’ve found the politics of projects affects contributions greatly
Those kinds of problems aren’t particularly new (PGP comes to mind as an example back when you couldn’t export it out of the US), but it’s a reminder that a lot of open-source comes from the US and Europe and is subject to western nation’s will. The US is also apparently thinks China is “stealing” RISC-V.
To me that goes against the spirit of open-source, where where you come from and who you are shouldn’t matter, because the code is by the people for the people and no money is exchanged. It’s already out there in the open, it’s not like it will stop the enemy from using the code. What’s also silly about this is if the those people were contributing anonymously under a fake or generic name, nothing would have happened.
The Internet got ruined when Facebook normalized/enforced using your real identity online.
The Internet got ruined when Facebook normalized/enforced using your real identity online.
They now encourage fake accounts. Has made moderating groups somewhat harder.
Yes. There is an extremely arbitrary distinction made between the USA and Russia. Both are known for injecting spyware. China is somehow still okay? It makes no sense.
Not to mention the elephant in the room by not banning another certain country actively committing war crimes.
All software should be safety checked. Where the maintainer is from should be irrelevant.
But the most weird aspect is the timing. Why now and not a few years ago?
All part of the current US/NATO approved Overton Window, friend.
*Overton
Ha. Autocorrect strikes again! Fixed it and Thanks, for pointing it out.
China is somehow still okay?
China is too important a supplier to the West. Sanctions against them would lead to retaliatory sanctions against the West from China which would be economically devastating.
Obviously they are just as dangerous and as actively involved is espionage as the other world players, but they hold too many cards to risk escalation. The West is also too important to their economy to escalate beyond war games. At least - we all hope so.
There is an extremely arbitrary distinction made between the USA and Russia.
Your world view seems to be highly influenced by propaganda. It’s very easy to draw a distinction between these two countries. Let me start with an easy one:
Russia is a dictatorship, the US is a democracy.
US is a democracy
Lmfao
Modern Russia is a shitty liberal “democracy” just as incompetent as the US’s
No, it’s not. But the US is closer to it than some Americans think.
The commenter says as he repeats other propaganda.
The US is not and has never been a democracy. The US is an oligarchy.
Read The People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn.
At best, it was for a while a Representative Democracy. Where people gave their vote to other people to vote for them.
The fact that most Americans think the US is not an oligarchy, today, is a testament to the power of the State and their corporate media to propagandized their own citizens. It is very rich for them to point to other country’s Oligarchies and somehow absolutely fail to see their own. Or worse, call it some weird type of conspiracy to call out or point out reality.
I mean, it is not like it is not obvious if one takes a step back or two and looks at it objectively.
Your world view seems to be highly influenced by propaganda. A country ruled by two identical genocidal capitalist parties isn’t a “democracy”; it’s a capitalist dictatorship.
Any party genuinely wanting to advance working class causes will not be allowed to come to power through it (they won’t be funded by the capitalist backers that fund/control the two ruling parties to begin with), and anyone in power that happens to hurt the country’s imperial prowess will be disposed of by the ruling parties, the way JFK was assassinated for wanting to abolish the CIA and reducing US troops in the Middle East.
Read about Operation Condor. Its actions, repercussions and number of deaths due to it, and continue to pretend the USA follows Democratic Values™. And this is just but one example.
They are just better at PR than most. You are walking proof of it.
A KGB spy and a CIA agent meet up in a bar for a friendly drink
“I have to admit, I’m always so impressed by Soviet propaganda. You really know how to get people worked up,” the CIA agent says.
“Thank you,” the KGB says. “We do our best but truly, it’s nothing compared to American propaganda. Your people believe everything your state media tells them.”
The CIA agent drops his drink in shock and disgust. “Thank you friend, but you must be confused… There’s no propaganda in America.”
well yeah, how does us being democracy change the fact that they basically did almost everything that Russia did
“basically”
You’ll be surprised if you actually challenge your convictions.
I did, and I found that the US does WORSE shit than Russia sometimes.
Russia ain’t good. Neither is the US. Get your head out of your ass.
Heard about what Russia has been doing in the occupied parts of Ukraine?
Heard about what the US did in Afghanistan? US soldiers raped a LOT of children before and after murdering their entire families.
America JUST exited a decades long war where the only results were death and destruction.
Tell me more about the US government requiring their soldiers to rape pre-teen girls then.
Or, you know, they really aren’t the same.
Are you sure you want to compare how many wars the US has waged compared to Russia and how many people they’ve murdered each?
That commenter is doing you a favour by implying it’s anywhere close.
The current Russian govt is not aligned with Soviet principles or ideology, right?
And the Stalin period saw the Soviets fighting and defeating the Nazis in WW2. Does the calculation of excess mortalities account for such effects too?
Nazi instigators punished, famine caused by the effect of war, infrastructure damage by the Nazis, deaths in Nazi occupied areas. These things don’t seem to be discussed much.Invasion of Vietnam.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_in_the_Vietnam_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_invasion_of_Afghanistan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemalan_genocide
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_assassination_attempts_on_Fidel_Castro
https://dessalines.github.io/essays/us_atrocities.html#sources--starting-pointshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_United_States
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Japanese-American_internment_camps
And since the current Russia is seen as the extension of the Soviets:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_genocide_in_the_United_Stateshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_1876-1878
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_major_famines_in_India_during_British_rule
Which one is killing us faster? I’m pretty sure it’s the USA. Nice that you get to live in a democracy I guess but that doesn’t mean a damn thing to someone living outside the USA and being exploited and abused by it.
I’m in Sweden. The idea that the US is somehow more of a danger to us than Russia is laughable.
Russia invading is a statistical risk. The USA (as the leading avatar of capital) exploiting, degrading, and destroying the commons we need to survive is an unavoidable certainty. Russia and Sweden are also doing those things, but on a significantly lesser scale.
Maybe you should read the IPCC reports?
That’s a lot to cover… I’ve learned so far that Russia is responsible for 4% of the world’s CO_2 emissions, and that emissions in Russia and Ukraine have decreased fastest of all countries since 1990. That the USA is responsible for 28% of all emissions that have accumulated since the Industrial revolution, and that Russia has emitted 11%. Is there something specific you would like me to learn about?
In large part, it’s simply a matter of scale and wealth concentration. If Canada was as large and wealthy as the USA, we’d probably all be cooked by now.
Climate change is not a risk to human survival. Please study the WG2 parts for the possible risks we’re facing depending on when and how much action we take.
You’re correct in that large parts of Russia don’t have indoor toilets and proper sanitation. Not sure that’s a positive.
Aaaaah hahahahaha i wish i could see your face while you were typing out this “lesson” omg. Sheeeeheehee i can’t, i can’t! were you proud of yourself when you hit reply, like “aw yeah gottem”?
It wasn’t a culture shock but it made something obvious that sometimes gets forgotten. The “Open” just means that one can look at the source code and copy it to make a new version. There is no obligation of the original creators to support things outside of what they want/can do.
Of course. It’s still just a software project.
It just shows how hypocritical and Western biased the community is. Are Israeli and US maintainers ever going to get kicked out of projects for their countries many crimes? No of course not, they would never apply their own standards to themselves, which defeats the point of them in the first place.
Not really, open source projects don’t necessarily have to be open to all contributors and I was aware of this already. They have to be open to anyone doing what they want with the code, by definition, which is good, but they don’t have to allow everyone to contribute to upstream. I’m not sure if there’s any particular defence against this being used in a discriminatory manner, but I do think this effect is significantly mitigated by the decentralised nature of open source and the fact that it’s not too uncommon for forks to become preferred over the original, the fact that open source projects rise and fall in popularity, etc.
I wonder if there’s some way to manage an open source project so that it’s not subject to particular national laws in this way.
It’s not decentralized on the level of project development, the visible proof of which is what we’ve seen happen.
How many times have you seen two branches of a significant project to coexist with comparable popularity?
I wonder if there’s some way to manage an open source project so that it’s not subject to particular national laws in this way.
Yes. Pseudonymous software development. I’ve seen Ross Ulbricht’s name today, so we also know the risks.
Naturally this is closer to some underground warez than to copyleft, because the legal ways of protecting copylefted information against appropriation will not be available. A different paradigm.
Is this really Linux drama though? It seems more like political drama that ended up jizzing on Linux.
I mean, yeah, there’s been drama after the decision was made based on legal issues brought about by political drama, but this part of it isn’t, if you get the distinction.
The only real linux drama part, as far as I can see is the crappy way it was announced, which isn’t what most of the people involved in the drama after the fact are complaining about.
I dunno, I’m not complaining about the post here, just talking about the overall issue itself using the post as a jumping point.
Anyway, I guess what I’m getting at is that foss development can’t be immune from political fuckery (no matter how justified or unjustified it is). Everyone that’s going to be involved in development is going to live under some nation’s thumb, and is vulnerable to any legal ramifications of that nation. So there’s no way to prevent a project being strongarmed; all that’s possible is having enough people that can review the code do so, so that any fuckery that affects the project is known, so that everyone can decide what they want to do about it as individuals.
As long as individual people have the ability to use any foss software they want on their own devices, there’s a limit to how bad the fuckery can get. Tbh, I’m more worried about corporate fuckery in foss projects than governmental
Linux at this point is an absolutely critical part of the information infrastructure our world is built on. It’s not just a few nerds in basements cobbling together code. Safeguarding this infrastructure against bad actors is absolutely crucial for everybody’s safety. Unfortunately we’re going to see more of this kind of stuff in an increasingly polarised world.
Depending on industry, 60-80% of all servers, globally, are running on Linux. So yes, we are not going away.
Israelis are more known for putting backdoors wherever they can than Russians, for example.
Anyway, nation-states are not the only kind of group with malicious interest. Maybe a maintainer is a member of some mafia, I dunno. How are you going to know this?
Many things can be done with FreeBSD. Again, in our time it may get some popularity again not because of such events even, but because of their possibility and to avoid monoculture (in the context of backdoors too).
Open source means open source, I never assume anything else from open source projects.
Well, in theory open source is immune to all that. However, the country a project is registered at, matters. That’s why the RISC-V project, for example, took its headquarters from the US to Switzerland. For that exact reason: so no country could strong arm it, especially since Chinese were the major contributors to the project (Switzerland is not 100% neutral, but it’s more neutral than other countries).
Yes. If FOSS projects bend the knee to shitty laws just because “they are the law”, then FOSS is free labor for corporations with no gains for the people.
That’s the point of FOSS as copyleft, to use the law to protect “free and open” information. This allows bigger projects, because contributors don’t have to keep their heads down.
At the same time maybe this is a downside, not an upside. As the reason why it has all gotten so big and complex and corporate-influenced.
It really is. Relying on a government good will to protect people best interests may be the point of failure of FOSS. I hope not but I’m less and less optimistic about the future
The usual consequences to not following the law are not in your favor.
If your goal in contributing to FOSS is to go to prison, there are a lot better avenues to achieve that.
Law aren’t always right and governments don’t always do the best neither for the world nor for its citizens. Open source projects and corporations shouldn’t rely on any government, they shouldn’t do the biddings on governments — either “good” or “bad” — and act in people best interests.
Of course this is a pipe dream and what we got is more free work for companies with none the benefits
I don’t understand why you think “avoiding prison” equals free work for companies. The individuals contributing to open source are subject to the same laws we’re discussing in this thread, and are the ones that would actually be getting consequences.
No one exists without a government, and that’s not even a pipe dream, it’d be societal collapse.
Because FOSS stands for both free software and people’s freedom. No one exists without a government except for external forces that are stronger than the government itself (lobbying is a way to strong arm a government), but this is another matter entirely.
FOSS organisations should exist outside a government because governments are easily corruptible, which is has happened again and again throughout history and is slowly happening right now. And obeying the law not to be thrown in jail is a nice argument, yes, and a shitty one at that: imagine how good would be a German citizen to abide to the government rule during the Nazi period. This doesn’t mean either that they shouldn’t follow any laws, but that, much like any international organisation, they should be international laws agreed on by multiple nations.
Which is essentially the crux of the matter: as long as FOSS projects work within the framework of a government (the US), the project can be easily hijacked, turned into something that goes against people interests. What are the people interests? In short, the minimum denominator is equality, freedom to speak, a right to privacy.
If FOSS projects do have to follow a government’s laws, then contributing to one is free work for corporations: laws can be changed and a democratic society can turn into a non-democratic entity, with laws that restrict the freedom of its citizens; in EU they try to pass a “chat control” law to make cryptography useless [by adding a back door] and while I believe it won’t pass no doubt it’s a worrisome sign. At the end of the day who would benefit the most from FOSS but companies, which do so already?
And to reiterate: sometime it’s better to be thrown in prison than to send someone else to their death
Which corporation are you talking about here?
America™
Nearly every single corporation with an online presence uses free software from the foss community.
What happened this time?
Edit, answered elsewhere:
Recently, Linux removed several people from their organization that have Russian email addresses. Linus made a statement that confirmed this was done intentionally. I believe that there was some mention of following sanctions on Russia due to the war. I haven’t looked into the details of it all, so take my analysis with a grain of salt. From what I understand, it sounded like it was only Russian maintainers that were removed and normal users submitting code from Russia can still contribute. Maintainers have elevated permissions and can control what code gets accepted into a project, meaning that a bad actor could allow some malicious code to sneak past. This may have also contributed to the decision since this type of attack has happened before and Russia seems like a likely culprit. The reactions to this change have been varied. Some people feel it is somewhat justified or reasonable, some people think that it means it is no longer open source, and some people think it is unfairly punishing Russian civilians (it is worth noting that that is part of the point of sanctions).
It changed my view on how true to their ideas some people are.
No
Removed by mod
One of the big weaknesses of open source is the same as democracy. Nobody has time to review every piece of code (or research and hold accountable every politician) which leads to risks.
How is that weakness different to installing closed source software?
It’s a different risk vector. While companies want your information to sell, they don’t want to take over your computer to use it in a bot net or steal your bank information and clean out your account.
Open source by it’s very nature relies on a lot of people having good intentions, free time, and knowledge for it to work well and safely.
Actually - a lot of closed source programs are still vulnerable to the supply chain attacks you mention where a bad actor has got access to their codebase. This has happened and been reported on, plus I’m sure, plenty of occasions where it was hushed up for reputational reasons. And - much commercial software still uses FOSS dependencies, so is also vulnerable to the same situation you describe for that. Worst of both worlds.
I don’t think either system is inherantly better than the other in terms of computer security. Each has different and overlapping vulnerabilities.
