FTA: "The code can't be merged into Linux kernel unless the contributor can verify they're not working in a sanctioned company of said country (guilty until proven innocent)"
That's explicitly not true, according to the Linux foundation. OFAC sanctions restrict providing a service, so here the violation would be two-way collaboration, not the receipt of information.
The kernel could review & merge the patch without running afoul of sanctions. What they cannot do is have dialogue with the sanctioned contributor.
Logic is not subject to sanctions, and anyone also may look at the submission and implement a matching fix.
So here’s the thing. The author thinks that Greg K-H is under some sort of obligation to respond to the patch they submitted. But that’s just not how free software works.
Greg K-H is a fully autonomous human being and he doesn’t work for the author of tfa. It sucks that we live in a world where nation states try to put exploits into the linux kernel and other foss projects but we very much do live in that world. It sucks that that means the author doesn’t get to contribute to the Linux kernel because their government (who they presumably have little control over) are very active in doing that, but that too is a fact of life.
Either way Greg K-H doesn’t owe you or me or the author anything and people need to stop being so entitled about free software.
That was very much not the thing. He's raising an interesting point, if true. Namely that sanctioned countries could severely damage the progress of Linux by supplying good patches.
> Other people who would like to have this bug fixed can't commit it from their name or reuse the code present in the mail list from assumingly sanctioned entity
> The bug is forced to be fixed in some other way, not in a way it has been fixed by the bug fix contributor
I'm not quite following, why is this the case? If another non-Russian contributor submits the same fix, why wouldn't it be merged? If the project is GPL-licensed, surely that means the author of the fix doesn't retain any "patent" rights as the author describes it?
I suppose it's not about patents or copyright but rather the fear that a re-submitted patch can't be trusted because the original patch is considered not trustworthy, or that the resubmission is carried out by the sanction person itself or a friend under an email address that doesn't fall under the sanctions. Either way, it could be seen as a liability.
This is great. I am happy to hear that russians get ostracized as they should be.
Quick reminder - sanctions are there because their army is currently is involved in brutal invasion, mass state sanctioned rapes, murders, bombings of civilians with hundreds of missiles and drones launched on cities, kidnapping children and putting them for adoption to russian families. Each penny paid to them will fuel their war machine. Every open project will be used in their war crimes.
Do not reply to russians. They are not victims in this. They are perpetrators of this brutal war.
A person is not responsible for the actions of their government. All governments wage war and cause suffering.
I have many close friends who are Russian by nationality. Russian by crime of accident of birth. So many of my friends in this situation abhor the actions of their government.
The Mentor stated it best. Phrack 7, 1986:
"We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals."
I've been thinking lately that what underpinned the FOSS golden age was not actually decentralized VCS and high-quality forges, nor even ZIRP, but rather peacetime.
After a period of branches and patchsets, full national hard forks are going to become de rigeur, and linux-derived OSes across the world are going to bloom necessarily, as we no longer have the kind of ambient trust required to collaborate across borders.
Look forward to Euro-linux, Sino-BSD, and I guess probably some sort of GCC-area build as well.
Patches will be accepted across national boundaries with only the highest scrutiny, which itself will likely be provided by nationalized AI platforms.
This is a great thing for innovation though? Nations/blocs protecting their tech interests will result in more jobs to go round in the industry, more unique ideas, and less centalisation, surely?
The globalised, hyper-centralised world is a bit boring, tbh.
I spent like 20% of my adult life in Ukraine and Russia. They overwhelmingly don't like the globalosed world.
Ukraine might be a fashion symbol in the west, but when I was volunteering out there in the first year, the points of view where mainly wanting to be like Poland; not absorbing the values of the wider west.
There’s literally nothing stopping them from fixing the bug in either this case or the hypothetical. The maintainer just doesn’t respond to email from .ru domains. He could still choose to take the patch. He may just have decided not to accept this patch because changing something quite obscure to fix a weird printer used by one guy is likely to cause more problems than it solves. We don’t know because he didn’t respond.
That certainly doesn’t mean he wouldn’t fix a serious bug just because he heard about it from a .ru address.
He's saying that they can not accept the same patch, even from someone else, once it's been submitted by a sanctioned country. It's little to do with getting a reply.
I haven't verified if what he's saying is true though.
I still have a MB with just a USB 1.1 controller. I would hate it if the USB stopped working after this fix. I think a config option for the delay would be best.
That's explicitly not true, according to the Linux foundation. OFAC sanctions restrict providing a service, so here the violation would be two-way collaboration, not the receipt of information.
The kernel could review & merge the patch without running afoul of sanctions. What they cannot do is have dialogue with the sanctioned contributor.
Logic is not subject to sanctions, and anyone also may look at the submission and implement a matching fix.
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/navigating-global-regul...