- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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Holy shit that got spicy. I was not expecting a Ukrainian and a Serb to start bickering back and forth while stacking racks over the level of support a country gave to the Nazis in WW2 on a kernel mailing list like they were in the comments here on Lemmy.
I get that tensions are high, and for many people the geopolitical reality is their homes being used as cover on an active front line, but like bro your actual fucking name is attached to these messages. At least I keep my most unhinged shit on a semi-anonymous platform. They need to lock it the fuck up.
Edit - jfc, a few messages later somebody comes in with something along the lines of “Taiwan isn’t a country, it’s part of China. When reunification comes sanctions won’t be appropriate against Chinese entities.” Is Lemmy just a front end for this mailing list and I had no idea this entire time?
I thought you were joking, but yup they actually started quizzing eachother on WW2.
It’s not the end of Linux by any means, but that’s gonna be hard to work together afterwards
Jeeeeez that was a lot. I get the sense that the kernel has worked as well as it has because people saw it as separate from geopolitics and so didnt discuss them…now that politics has wedged its way in I feel like it may have opened that door permanently.
I’m optimistic, since technical arguments can be pretty heated yet they end like this:
At least I keep my most unhinged shit on a semi-anonymous platform.
🔥
Taiwan isn’t a country, it’s part of China
This is not a hot take, it’s the official position of the United States of America and 90% of the population of the world. Those who say Taiwan is its own country are radical fringe separatists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_China#United_States_policy
Geopolitics posters will no longer be contained by petty accusations of “bringing politics into it”, the NATOids have drawn blood. There is no turning back now.
this is great 🍿🍿🍿
Not even Taiwan claims to be a country though. They claim to be the sole legitimate government of China, hence their actual name, The Republic Of China, and not “republic of taiwan” or some other thing.
While it was true for a long time, I don’t think Taiwan expects to get China back anymore. It’s more not to start WW3 for the last 30+ years
Not even Taiwan claims to be a country though. They claim to be the sole legitimate government of China, hence their actual name, The Republic Of China,
Isn’t that, by definition, calling yourself a country?
Wrong phrasing on my part.
No matter which side you ask, the Republic Of China (ROC) or the People’s Republic of China (PRC) Taiwan isn’t a country, it is a region of the country of China. Saying that Taiwan is a country satisfies neither the ROC nor the PRC’s claims
That’s why what Linus said was stupid when he brought WWII into this conversation…
They are not wrong though Taiwan isn’t a country. They have never declared independence their government has never officially given up their claim of being the rightful ruler of China. I have no idea why none of these have not been done.
Because China has always held it would start a full-scale invasion if they ever did. So everyone ignores the elephant and keeps the status quo…
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If you think kernel maintainers are ‘techbros’ then you dont really understand that term
does anyone?
if you live in the bay area, youd understand who works in tech, and whose a tech bro, very easily.
Living and working in silicon valley for 20 years and then moving to Austin and then Chicago has shown me the reality of how much of a bubble that the Bay Area is.
Nothing translates and tech bro there has a VERY different meaning outside of it.
No
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That applies to most of the drama surrounding Linux.
It would probably be more controversial if Linus had given more professional commentary.
It is not good for the kernel and it’s team to suddenly have to kowtow to Usamerican politics.
The reality is that the Linux Foundation is in the United States, and Linus is a naturalized US citizen who lives in Oregon (at least on Wikipedia). So they both will have to pay attention to avoid transacting business with individuals and companies on the SDN list. That is the law in the United States.
What an extremely dangerous place to domicile such an important project.
Maybe it’s time to fork the Linux Foundation and fix those two problems.
And it can cost you up to 30 years for breaking it. I’d listen to my lawyers too.
Kreg moved to Europe, last I heard. So at least the heir apparent is in a region with better potential international diplomacy and neutrality.
Inheritance wars wasn’t something on my FOSS list…
Western Europe has committed to making itself an American dependency. This same thing would eventually repeat there but with different aesthetics.
Would a fork be the solution to avoid having a system that is crucial for people worldwide cease to be a weapon at the hands of merrican politicians?
It’ll be at the hands of whatever jurisdiction the forker is in. It’s not like you can escape governments.
brazilian linux fork when?
I’m afraid that if the sanctions will continue to be a go-to method of dealing with geopolitical rivals, we may end up with a few divergent forks. One for US and “the west” block, one for Chinese comrades with their junior Russian partners, and maybe one for Indian code gurus who don’t like both sides and have capable engineering resources themselves.
Could be. Maybe not a hard fork, if this slap fight can be contained in the driver space. I’d keep an eye on OpenHarmony and OpenKylin.
Thank you for that! I was perplexed since I’ve been in the Linux space for 25 years and I was thinking that I would have to switch to bsd.
If you think BSDs are devoid of drama you’re in for a cold shower…
Switch to OpenBSD if you have to, at least the drama there is super funny
I was thinking that I would have to switch to bsd.
Finally the year of Hurd on the desktop?
Doesn’t free BSD not allow anyone with a Chinese or Russian sounding name already.
I’m afraid that if the sanctions will continue to be a go-to method of dealing with geopolitical rivals, we may end up with a few divergent forks. One for US and “the west” block, one for […]
Considering that that this idea of making a Linux for the US vs a Linux for “the rest of the world” was what made me ditch Fedora for Debian, it’d be a shame to have it happen to Linux as well. Like, sure, an alternative will emerge, but where does one go while that progresses to be daily-driver? Haiku?
Real question: does India contribute anything to the kernel?
This kind of thing is the inevitable outcome of US policy to “decouple”, which they are pushing. Take something they nominally control, kick out every designated enemy / enemy collaborator, and then watch as an alternative pops up among the " enemy" and ban its purchase or use.
Would a fork be technically viable if Americans and American businesses can’t participate (because the fork works with SDN entities)? Maybe.
I’m guessing most IoT devices are made in China (or increasingly Southeast Asia), so yes.
Sure for not but it we’ll go nowhere. Most of the kernel developers are paid developers it’s not somebody working on it in there free time.
Then they should try to free themselves from it.
And governments should wise up and exempt them from any kind of petty stuff.
In the balance between geopolitical conflicts and Linux, the latter is the petty stuff.
This is not something that needs balance.
And they have quite different kinds of petty:
When Linus gets petty, then there’s a proper rant, somebody gets red in the face (but you don’t get to see the pics), and some news interns can write headlines.
When politicians get petty, then people in foreign countries are killed.
Suddenly? Linux entities have always had to follow the rules of the country they exist in. A kernel isn’t a sovereign nation no matter how loud the what-about army becomes.
Getting whiplash between “haha Russian invaders and bots get fucked!!! Finland!!! Wooooo Finland!!!” and “ah, we take no pleasure in doing this, our hands are tied”
Maybe the professional communications and Mastodon bubble Linus has been posting in led him to believe everyone in the world hates Russians now and that would be really well received
Theodore T’so especially:
first comment:
The question of why a particular country has decided to sanction Russia and not Ukraine, and why a country has decided to support one country versus another, whether it’s Germany, France, and Poland sending tanks and armored vehicles to Ukraine, or North Korea sending artillary shells to Russia, is not up to the Linux development commuity.
next comment:
Sanctions are imposed by Governments — for example, the US, European, Japan, Switzerland, Norway, etc. Not Linux developers, nor Russian troll farms, nor Russia’s useful idiots on the internet. It’s not up to anyone on this mail thread.
Damn there are a surprising number of maintainers that are comrades and not taking this lying down from the western supremacist cohort.
Linus opened up a massive can of worms and turned this into a geopolitical conflict by acting like a baby.
This comment by Hantong Chen is great:
Hi James,
Here’s what Linus has said, and it’s more than just “sanction.”
Moreover, we have to remove any maintainers who come from the following countries or regions, as they are listed in Countries of Particular Concern and are subject to impending sanctions:
- Burma, People’s Republic of China, Cuba, Eritrea, Iran, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan.
- Algeria, Azerbaijan, the Central African Republic, Comoros, and Vietnam.
For People’s Republic of China, there are about 500 entities that are on the U.S. OFAC SDN / non-SDN lists, especially HUAWEI, which is one of the most active employers from versions 5.16 through 6.1, according to statistics. This is unacceptable, and we must take immediate action to address it, with the same reason.
Meh, if they really leave this will prompt the US government or corps to finally start paying these developers. This flare up is a blessing in disguise.
Wait until you find out how much of Linux the NSA has built.
Next to none. You’re just spreading FUD.
selinux is one example.
They haven’t been involved with that for years and it’s open source so it’s as likely to have a backdoor as any other part of the code.
The NSA also created tor
Wasn’t Huawei trying to put a Backdoor into linux?
If yes, I see why they finally want to restrict maintainers to countries they can trust
Wasn’t Huawei trying to put a Backdoor into linux?
as far as i know, that has not happened.
what makes you think it did?
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Articles back in the days.
I found a random one now. Maybe I got just clickbaited with titles back then. I dunno
https://securityboulevard.com/2020/12/was-this-huaweis-failed-attempt-at-a-linux-backdoor/
Funny that blog calls it a “failed attempt at a backdoor” while neglecting to mention that the grsec post (which it does link to and acknowledges is the source of the story) had been updated months prior to explicitly refute that characterization:
5/22/2020 Update: This kind of update should not have been necessary, but due to irresponsible journalists and the nature of social media, it is important to make some things perfectly clear:
Nowhere did we claim this was anything more than a trivially exploitable vulnerability. It is not a backdoor or an attempted backdoor, the term does not appear elsewhere in this blog at all; any suggestion of the sort was fabricated by irresponsible journalists who did not contact us and do not speak for us.
There is no chance this code would have passed review and be merged. No one can push or force code upstream.
This code is not characteristic of the quality of other code contributed upstream by Huawei. Contrary to baseless assertions from some journalists, this is not Huawei’s first attempt at contributing to the kernel, in fact they’ve been a frequent contributor for some time.
Damn, I have been thinking bad about them for too long for shitty journalism
What were Linus comments that precipitated this?
The rage comes from LF actions and Linus words. All they had to do was to say: Thank you people for your contribution but we have no other choice, this is the law. But they did quite the opposite and Linus showed his true ugly white western supremacy face for all to see. That is the cause of the rage.
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.No clue how all this shakes out. Not real invested in this ideological/bureaucratic slap fight.
It’s always entertaining when Linus flames off.
When Linus becomes entertaining is when he is not doing his job properly.
Either the death of the Linux Foundation or the exclusion of the Linux foundation from kernel development for at least a few versions. In any case Linus likely used the last of his goodwill in proving he’s more American than any other descriptor.
Ehh. IDK if that would be bad or good for Linux. More choices against the possibility of weaker teams/poorer code. Even if things did fragment for a while, one version likely comes out on top and everyone migrates slowly back together.
Interwebs and tech seems to route around this sort of thing.
It’s better in the long term, free software and the political philosophy behind it is entirely incompatible with American political ideology or geopolitics generally. If everyone can contribute, everyone can benefit. When you start limiting this by arbitrary nonsensical reasoning due to legal obligations you only have because the founder of the foundation has a boner for an idealized America that never existed… Shit gets worse. From this many developers are going to permanently leave Linux development and a few may get petty enough to change their license to prevent use in Linux.
Yah sure the guys who are paid to contribute to Linux are going to leave.
Yes, if enough principaled contributors leave, it’ll no longer make sense for companies to pay for people to contribute.
Sure but tech has only existed during peaceful times. With the world splitting apart you can’t assume it we’ll be the same outcome.
Given how used I am to every statement by a politician or business being this slick, polished, carefully re-drafted beige speech it’s a real contrast to see someone like Torvalds just blasting out their thoughts
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linus-Torvalds-Russian-Devs
tl;dr: anyone who disagrees is a russian troll or a useful idiot, according to the linux man
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This will be a nothing burger in 6 months
Wow:
Oleksiy Protas
P.S. “Don’t feed the trolls”
Don’t you worry. Our friend here tried to reply to this message, he did so twice in fact with slightly different wording, but it was full of political rage and tu quoque so I assume he fell victim to the spam filter thanks to you special counter-baiting operation so to speak.
That aside, I did a very superficial search and it seems that the original author had already had a pull being rejected on the grounds it was coming straight from his Baikal credentials. It’s a real pity that an apparently very able engineer is just playing pretend despite knowing full well why is it so that LF migh not want to be associated with Baikal in any way.
Serge Semin
Hello Linux-kernel community,
I am sure you have already heard the news caused by the recent Greg’ commit 6e90b675cf942e (“MAINTAINERS: Remove some entries due to various compliance requirements.”). As you may have noticed the change concerned some of the Ru-related developers removal from the list of the official kernel maintainers, including me.
The community members rightly noted that the quite short commit log contained very vague terms with no explicit change justification. No matter how hard I tried to get more details about the reason, alas the senior maintainer I was discussing the matter with haven’t given an explanation to what compliance requirements that was. I won’t cite the exact emails text since it was a private messaging, but the key words are “sanctions”, “sorry”, “nothing I can do”, “talk to your (company) lawyer”… I can’t say for all the guys affected by the change, but my work for the community has been purely volunteer for more than a year now (and less than half of it had been payable before that). For that reason I have no any (company) lawyer to talk to, and honestly after the way the patch has been merged in I don’t really want to now. Silently, behind everyone’s back, bypassing the standard patch-review process, with no affected developers/subsystem notified - it’s indeed the worse way to do what has been done. No gratitude, no credits to the developers for all these years of the devoted work for the community. No matter the reason of the situation but haven’t we deserved more than that? Adding to the GREDITS file at least, no?..
I can’t believe the kernel senior maintainers didn’t consider that the patch wouldn’t go unnoticed, and the situation might get out of control with unpredictable results for the community, if not straight away then in the middle or long term perspective. I am sure there have been plenty ways to solve the problem less harmfully, but they decided to take the easiest path. Alas what’s done is done. A bifurcation point slightly initiated a year ago has just been fully implemented. The reason of the situation is obviously in the political ground which in this case surely shatters a basement the community has been built on in the first place. If so then God knows what might be next (who else might be sanctioned…), but the implemented move clearly sends a bad signal to the Linux community new comers, to the already working volunteers and hobbyists like me.
Thus even if it was still possible for me to send patches or perform some reviews, after what has been done my motivation to do that as a volunteer has simply vanished. (I might be doing a commercial upstreaming in future though). But before saying goodbye I’d like to express my gratitude to all the community members I have been lucky to work with during all these years. Specifically:
NTB-folks, Jon, Dave, Allen. NTB was my starting point in the kernel upstream work. Thanks for the initial advices and despite of very-very-very tough reviews with several complete patchset refactorings, I learned a lot back then. That experience helped me afterwards. Thanks a lot for that. BTW since then I’ve got several thank-you letters for the IDT NTB and IDT EEPROM drivers. If not for you it wouldn’t have been possible.
Andy, it’s hard to remember who else would have given me more on my Linux kernel journey as you have. We first met in the I2C subsystem review of my DW I2C driver patches. Afterwards we’ve got to be frequently meeting here and there - GPIO, SPI, TTY, DMA, NET, etc, clean/fixes/features patch(set)s. Quite heat discussions in your first reviews drove me crazy really. But all the time we managed to come up with some consensus somehow. And you never quit the discussions calmly explaining your point over and over. You never refused to provide more detailed justification to your requests/comments even though you didn’t have to. Thanks to that I learned how to be patient to reviewers and reviewees. And of course thank you for the Linux-kernel knowledges and all the tips and tricks you shared.
- Andy, please note due to the situation I am not going to work on my DW DMAC fixes patchset anymore. So if you ever wish to have DW UART stably working with the DW DMA-engine driver, then feel free to pick the series up: Link: https://lore.kernel.org/dmaengine/20240911184710.4207-1-fancer.lancer@gmail.com/
Linus (Walleij), after you merged one of my pretty much heavy patchset in you suggested to me to continue the DW APB GPIO driver maintaining. It was a first time I was asked to maintain a not-my driver. Thank you for the trust. I’ll never forget that.
Mark, thank you very much for entrusting the DW APB SSI driver maintenance to me. I’ve put a lot of efforts into making it more generic and less errors-prune, especially when it comes working under a DMA-engine control or working in the mem-ops mode. I am sure the results have been beneficial to a lot of DW SPI-controller users since then.
Damien, our first and last meeting was at my generic AHCI-platform and DW AHCI SATA driver patches review. You didn’t make it a quick and easy path. But still all the reviews comments were purely on the technical basis, and the patches were eventually merged in. Thank you for your time and experience I’ve got from the reviews.
Paul, Thomas, Arnd, Jiaxun, we met several times in the mailing list during my MIPS P5600 patches and just generic MIPS patches review. It was always a pleasure to discuss the matters with such brilliant experts in the field. Alas I’ve spent too much time working on the patches for another subsystems and failed to submit all the MIPS-related bits. Sorry I didn’t keep my promise, but as you can see the circumstances have suddenly drawn its own deadline.
Bjorn, Mani, we were working quite a lot with you in the framework of the DW PCIe RC drivers. You reviewed my patches. I helped you to review another patches for some time. Despite of some arguing it was always a pleasure to work with you. Mani, special thanks for the cooperative DW eDMA driver maintenance. I think we were doing a great work together.
Paolo, Jakub, David, Andrew, Vladimir, Russell. The network subsystem and particularly the STMMAC driver (no doubt the driver sucks) have turned to be a kind of obstacle on which my current Linux-kernel activity has stopped. I really hope that at least in some way my help with the incoming STMMAC and DW XPCS patches reviews lightened up your maintainance duty. I know Russell might disagree, but I honestly think that all our discussions were useful after all, at least for me. I also think we did a great work working together with Russell on the DW GMAC/QoS ETH PCS patches. Hopefully you’ll find a time to finish it up after all.
Rob, Krzysztof, from your reviews I’ve learned a lot about the most hardwary part of the kernel - DT sources and DT-bindings. All your comments have been laconic and straight to the point. That made reviews quick and easy. Thank you very much for that.
Guenter, special thanks for reviewing and accepting my patches to the hwmon and watchdog subsystems. It was pleasure to be working with you.
Borislav, we disagreed and argued a lot. So my DW uMCTL2 DDRC EDAC patches even got stuck in limbo for quite a long time. Anyway thank you for the time you spent reviewing my patches and trying to explain your point.
- Borislav, it looks like I won’t be able to work on my Synopsys EDAC patchsets anymore. If you or somebody else could pick them up and finish up the work it would be great (you can find it in the lore archive). The patches convert the mainly Zynq(MP)-specific Synopsys EDAC driver to supporting the generic DW uMCTL2 DDRC. It would be very beneficial for each platform based on that controller.
Greg, we met several times in the mailing lists. You reviewed my patches sent for the USB and TTY subsystems, and all the time the process was straight, highly professional, and simpler than in the most of my other case. Thank you very much for that.
Yoshihiro, Keguang, Yanteng, Kory, Cai and everybody I was lucky to meet in the kernel mailing lists, but forgot to mention here. Thank you for the time spent for our cooperative work on making the Linux kernel better. It was a pleasure to meet you here.
I also wish to say huge thanks to the community members trying to defend the kicked off maintainers and for support you expressed in these days. It means a lot.
A little bit statics of my kernel-work at the end:
Signed-off patches: 518 Reviewed and Acked patches: 253 Tested patches: 80
…
Best Regards, -Serge(y)
After Linus’ statement, I can’t be sure any more that Linux is free of NSA code… Sad times…
Dude, it’s common knowledge that NSA has contributed significant portions of (security related) code to the kernel. No tin foil hat required.
They also tried to put weak encryption in the kernel once.
I’m convinced that they did it under the radar.
Well it’s open source so you can check.
You mean like SELinux or other existing contributions to the linux kernel?
Just so odd how they went about the whole thing. Such an uncalculated way to do things.
Why not wait until you have all your explanations in order backed by lawyers before doing the release? Why did they shit on the carpet first and then explained their reasons afterwards after lots of horrible attempts at justifications that completely missed the point.
That’s Linus for you. He’s extremely misanthropic. This isn’t his first PR fuck up. Except this time his abrasiveness triggered an international incident.
It’s blatantly obvious and non-controversial what they’re doing. That’s why.
Excluding developers because of arbitrary sections issued by the most war mongering country in at least the last 10,000 years is not non-controversial, as it turns out.
Funny fucking thing to say considering why Russia is under sanction.
This isn’t a real comment, is it?
Anyway, the Linux kernel team are not about to fight the US government, particularly not to defend Russia. If you’re so concerned about warmongering then leave Russia. Solves all the problems here. You don’t gotta go to the US, even.
The US sanctions anyone that isn’t under their complete control, it’s not a serious country.
And I’m truly sorry you’re too much of a brainwashed nationalist to understand why free software shouldn’t be affected by petty politics.
Yah ok the US is the most wealthy most powerful country in the world and they are not a serious country. Maybe the rest of the world should stop relying on America for everything. I really hope this starts tech sectors in other countries but somehow I don’t think it well. Besides China who is still reliant on American companies.
China is divesting as quickly as possible from the US as they’ve overtaken the use in GDP
other countries rely on the US because the US uses military intervention and economic sanctions to ensure everyone has to rely on them. this is not difficult to understand
Jackass says most war mongering ignoring the actual country invading another.
Typical.
Jackass forgets that the US invaded and occupied another country for most of the 21st century.
Typical.
I’m sorry, even if you go back to the original Russian empire, no entity or arbitrary collection of entities containing a “Russia” has invaded more countries or killed more civilians than the US.
That’s the plain fact of the matter. Invading more than 70 countries does that.
Russia bad, the US is and will always be worse.
Someone has forked Linux https://github.com/Cqinux/cinux
Linus Torvalds has been sold out to big tech companies like Google and Microsoft. He himself is a billionaire and no longer writes any code.
I can’t take that seriously
Yeah a dozen or so commits updating readme files isn’t exactly compelling stuff. Any of us could do this in five minutes on GitHub.
Still hosted on GitHub, a property of MicroSoft.
That’s because it’s pure bullshit. And this repo will be deleted or abandoned in a month.
Any bets on how likely that this is even maintained six months from now?
Six months don’t even give it a month. I don’t think most people want to admit how many kernel devs are paid devs. Nobody is doing all this work for free people need a home and food.
Doesn’t Linux already have a bunch of forks? I’m using the CachyOS kernel, for example
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Relevant, maintained? Zero.
At least one for each manufacturer that uses it under the hood in a Tivo-like manner
🤣🤣🤣
