Possession is irrelevant too. Access to source code has not being restricted, and doing so wouldn’t even be realistically possible. The only practical change is that new updates from these developers will not be published by the Linux Foundation, and ongoing integration will not be done by mainline Linux developers.

If Russia wants, they can fork Linux at any time, call it Rusinux, and do whatever they want with it. They could even port future Linux updates back to their kernel. They still have to keep it under the GPL2 license, but only if they want to honor Western copyright laws and treaties.

Sure, if words are meaningless.

Who owns the copyright is irrelevant. Russian developers are still entirely entitled to use and modify the Linux source. The only thing they can’t do is submit their changes for inclusion in the main Linux development tree. The only real consequence for them is that their changes might be broken by future kernel updates and they will have to fix it themselves to use newer kernels. That, and they will have to maintain their own distribution system. I’ve also seen nothing to suggest anyone’s code is being removed.

The US didn’t invade Ukraine and, obviously, isn’t under US or European sanctions. I’m sure that you and I could agree on a great deal when it comes to American foreign policy, it’s just not relevant to this situation where Russia is the clear aggressor. (Setting aside the usual “buffer zone” bullshit that every aggressor state uses and Putin already abandoned).

You left out “Russian invasion, Russian ethnic cleansing, and Russian war crimes.”

So, in your world, the US government is responsible to provide you with a detailed justification for the specific sanctions being applied against a foreign adversary? Keep waiting.

I really don’t think you understand what’s going on in the Russian economy right now. Russia has unwittingly gotten themselves embroiled in an existential conflict. (Less existential for the country than for the warlords running it.) Every expenditure or resources, natural, human, financial, etc, is being weighed against it’s benefits to the war. Even basic things like their ability to feed their population are only valued because the war can’t be fought without them. That’s what a war economy is.

Despite all the failures of the Russian military, it took well over a year for Putin to fire his top general. The reason it took so long was that Putin trusted his general to remain loyal and not initiate a coup. Removing him was a drastic move, but the more interesting part is who replaced him. The new Russian defense minister got the job with absolutely no military training, background, or experience. His only qualification was that he is an extremely capable economist who is largely credited with helping Russia transition to a war economy and blunt the impact of western sanctions. That should tell you all you need to know about how important Russia thinks economics are to the war.

our work should exist for all mankind and to the betterment of society as a whole

That’s nice and all, but totally unrealistic. The vast majority of kernel development is done because the developers (or their sponsors) benefit from the work they do and from having that work integrated with the rest of the kernel. I don’t see that as a bad thing.

Ban work on Russian firmware or Linux compatibility with Russian hardware.

There is no such thing as “Russian hardware” when it comes to computing. Russia has it’s own standards for a lot of technologies, but creating a proprietary set of computing standards that’s disconnected from the ecosystem of western hardware makes no sense. They manufacture some of their own computing hardware, but it’s all based on the same standards that are used everywhere else.

I would be absolutely amazed if the Russian government is somehow on the bleeding edge of linux development and actively deploying head branch builds of linux with the latest available firmware.

Why? Anyone contributing to the Linux kernel is, almost by definition, at the “bleeding edge of Linux development”. It may not be the bleeding edge pushing the boundaries of computer science, but it doesn’t have to be. A whole lot of kernel development is pretty basic stuff aimed to satisfy particular needs or requirements. Drones benefit greatly from highly specialized power management, real time data collection, flexible networking, etc. Most are built from off the shelf hardware and consumer electronics.

their almost certainly backporting to a stable linux release and that means this kinda ban if it follows you’re reason isn’t going to have an impact

The issue of drift exists with both older and newer kernels. If a particular kernel is so stable that drift isn’t an issue, then it isn’t a kernel that will be adding a bunch of new Russian commits anyways. If they are simply back-porting it themselves, then their inability to commit to the main Linux branches is irrelevant. In the scenario, the whole discussion is moot.

I’m not going to take that hill because the generals haven’t proven to me that it’s necessary to win the war.

This isn’t an isolated thing. It’s a small part of the biggest sanctions effort in history. Every single sanction, can be nit-picked in just the same way. There is very little in the way of technology that can’t be dual purposed into warfare, and those that can’t be are still relevant to the economic pressures being applied.

I have no idea why you are so sure that the development in question isn’t already connected to military drones, but it’s a really weird assumption. What exactly do you think is the number one priority for Russia right now in the area of technical development? What operating system do you think powers most drones, military or otherwise?

Most of these developers do work for companies that are paying them to make contributions so, it stands to reason that the kernel additions or changes are of particular use to those companies. Nothing is stopping them from continuing to make changes on their own fork for their own benefit, but that means drifting away from the mainline kernel. That adds extra work and overhead, which is the point.

I’ve seen nothing to suggest this has been identified as a concern, but modern warfare systems do often run on Linux. Some of these developers might already be contributing directly to the war. Also, economics are just as much a part of warfare as bullets and bombs. In this case particularly, economic factors are almost certainly going to be critical to ending the conflict.

I feel bad about the Russian conscripts who are being thrown at the front line in meat wave attacks to soak up bullets. I also support the Ukrainians firing those bullets because I recognize that there is a damn war going on.

I don’t have to feel ethnic or any other kind of hatred for Russian Linux developers to recognize that this is war and hobbling Russia’s technology sector is a necessary part of that. Every bit of lubricant for the Russian economy ultimately equates to more death in Ukraine.

Believe what you want dude but, like I said, even Putin dropped that nonsense.

Putin was so concerned about NATO expanding right to Russia’s doorstep that he did an invasion that immediately led to NATO expanding right to Russia’s doorstep. Even Putin stopped trying to sell that bullshit months ago, probably because it makes him look like a complete idiot.

If the US abandons Ukraine, you think that’s the end of the conflict? Completing an invasion is the easy part. It’s occupation that’s the hard part. That’s when the real brutality begins, and Russia doesn’t have nearly enough occupiers to do it properly. There will be at least a decade of even more horrific bloodshed, probably ending in a Russian withdrawal.

Your friend’s heart might be in the right place, but they don’t know how warfare works.

I’m against Russia invading Ukraine to commit genocide and steal scarce resources so, therefore, I must be in favor of killing people and stealing resources. Yeah, that tracks. Try harder.

The hundreds of thousands dead so-far will be glad to know that Putin is just being misunderstood and is actually a pretty nice guy. Who the fuck said anything about Hitler?

So, a US invasion of Cuba wouldn’t be aggressive? I guess words really don’t mean anything then. That’s some really pathetic whataboutism BTW.

What else would you call it? Even if you buy one of the many bullshit rationalizations Russia has offered, invading a sovereign neighbor is absolutely aggression, if words still mean things.

There is a hot war going on and the US is using sanctions to isolate Russia from using western technology to continue their genocide. That goes a little beyond “nationalistic ideas”. Russia is being isolated for their actions and this was past due. It sucks for the Russian maintainers, but under the heading of “war is hell” this is a minor inconvenience.

How exactly is he turning his back on the GPL? Those Russian maintainers are still free to fork the kernel, make whatever changes they want, and release it. The GPL has never guaranteed that a maintainer has to take contributions from anyone. Open source could never function that way.

Their interests aren’t generally all that aligned, so that helps. It’s pretty obvious that the garbage coming out of the cable news networks is at a minimum deeply sympathetic to American corporate interests, if not straight up misinformation.

From a US perspective, I see these tactics being used far more extensively by wealthy individuals and corporate interests than I do Chinese interests. Unfortunately, our government and especially our politicians are often directly involved in spreading misinformation and suppressing the truth. We need strategies that function outside of government to close the gaps between reality and public perception.