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by scoofy 604 days ago
Open source means put up or shut up. If you don’t like the institutions, then build it yourself.

You can’t cry foul when the group is literally providing you with free software. Open source institutions don’t own anyone anything beyond open software.
3 comments
woleium 604 days ago
That is the letter of the law, yes. I would suggest though that the spirit / intent behind the law includes fostering a community, which in turn encourages open and clear communication.
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throwup238 604 days ago
> spirit / intent behind the law

What specific law are you talking about?

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woleium 603 days ago
the GPL
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throwup238 603 days ago
The GNU General Public Law?
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talldayo 603 days ago
No, the legally binding licenses that fall under the purview of Copyleft enforcement. A critical component of modern Free Software is licenses that absolve the primary author of liability that is implicitly agreed-upon when contributing third-party code. If these contributors disagreed with the terms of the GPL then they had 30 years to realize it.
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immibis 604 days ago
And right now Linus is not putting up, is suddenly actively refusing to put up, and we're all very concerned about that.

As an open source community leader, putting up consists of leading well, and transparently. It's not just a coding role. He may have inherited the leadership role by being the original coder but he has to keep it by being a worthy leader.

I speculate Linus or Greg received the equivalent of a National Security Letter. Otherwise they could point to the regulations.

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rfoo 604 days ago
That's the first thing came to my mind too.

While a little bit too much of a guess, it's quite possible that whatever three letter agency finally had a high-confidence note on who was behind the XZ backdoor and decided to issue an (blatant) order to kick out all Russian maintainers, because that's how USG usually works.

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protomolecule 604 days ago
>the group is literally providing you with free software

It's not their software. Linux kernel is written by thousands of people from all around the world.

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kelipso 603 days ago
The quoted text is a great mechanism to turn your brain off. "Oh, they giving me stuff. They must be good then and can do no wrong. I can turn my brain off and go sleep."
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