(this post obviously assumes the recent removal of russian devs due to sanctions is bad; no need to comment if you disagree)
a lot of people i know are considering jumping ship to some bsd after the recent MAINTAINERS debacle, but i’m skeptical it would make any difference. afaik, they’re just as us-centric as linux if not more (it’s the berkeley software distribution, after all). also, my biggest gripe about the bsds and the main reason i’ve never had any interest in them is their permissive licensing. permissive licenses suck
would there be any difference wrt sanctions in the bsds or moving away from linux to *bsd bc of that would be pointless?
The problem isn’t even where the software is officially based, it can become a problem for individual contributors too.
PGP for example used to be problematic because US exports control on encryption used to forbid exporting systems capable of strong encryption because the US wanted to be able to break it when it’s used by others. Sending the tarball of the PGP software by an american to the soviets at the time would have been considered treason against the US, let alone letting them contribute to it. Heck, sharing 3D printable gun models with a foreign country can probably be considered supplying weapons like they’re real guns. So even if Linux was based in a more neutral country not subject to US sanctions, the sanctions would make it illegal to use or contribute to it anyway.
As much as we’d love to believe in the FOSS utopia that transcends nationality, the reality is we all live in real countries with laws that restrict what we can do. Ultimately the Linux maintainers had to do what’s best for the majority of the community, which mostly lives in NATO countries honoring the sanctions against Russia and China.
good response, but the last part feels a little circular reasoning
linux contributors live mostly in nato countries, so we have no choice but to push people from non-aligned countries away, which will prevent people from non-nato countries from joining, which will make most contributors be from nato countries
as someone said, people who were removed from the list can still contribute, i think, but this might lead to a situation where technology sovereignty will mean using your own regional linux fork
Non-aligned countries are fine, they can always invade most of the countries once again, the issue is with the Eastern block.
what’s the issue?
I think it is a circular problem.
Another example that comes to mind: the sanctions on Huawei and whether Google would be considered to be supplying software because Android is open-source. At the very least any contributions from Huawei is unlikely to be accepted into AOSP. The EU is also becoming problematic with their whole software origin and quality certifications they’re trying to impose.
This leads to exactly what you said: national forks. In Huawei’s case that’s HarmonyOS.
I think we need to get back to being anonymous online, as if you’re anonymous nobody knows where you’re from and your contributions should be based solely on its merit. The legal framework just isn’t set up for an environment like the Internet that severely blurs the lines between borders and no clear “this company is supplying this company in the enemy country”.
Governments can’t control it, and they really hate it.
It’s also the fact that the measures taken are very reminiscent of that one phrase about locks: they keep the honest people away.
I have serious doubts that an hacker group, government-sponsored or not, would be using corporate, easily-traceable emails, like the removed maintainers did.
Seeing governments tackle tech in general is very weird. Sometimes I wonder if they feel the same way when making this kind of decisions or actually never feel a little odd about them.