OpenBLAS Deciding Whether To Drop Support For Russia's Elbrus CPUs

[dimko]

Just to clarify, I'm pretty sure that's because U.S. law prohibits "exporting" "weapons technology" like SSL/TLS to countries on a blacklist of "terrorist-supporting" nations, which those countries are on. Any American company or U.S. citizen is bound by that.

IANAL, it is not specifically related to OSS software. Besides not all OSS is actually in US. And this law is inefficient at best. Anonymous can and will copy openssl package to Germany and from there to Cuba. How is this gonna be enforced? With Internet its trivial. Cuban guy can connect to German SFTP server to download Debian install that has SSL libraries, etc.

[coder]

Russia is literally invading a neighboring state, which is worse than anything China has done recently.

You should ask some Indians about that (armed skirmishes broke out between them in the Himalayas, as recently as a couple years ago). Or look at their island-building, in the South China Sea. They also have territorial disputes with Japan. Failing to honor their commitments of "one country, two systems" in Hong Kong should also fall somewhere on the list.

However, I take your point that China hasn't done anything remotely on this scale, since annexing Tibet by force.

I think China sees Ukraine as a test case for their taking-back of Taiwan. In fact, I half-expected them to coordinate a Taiwan invasion with Russia going into Ukraine. I guess that would be underestimating them.

[dimko]

Russia is literally invading a neighboring state, which is worse than anything China has done recently. Saudi Arabia is more of a fair comparison, but equally I can't remember seeing a Saudi open source contribution whereas Russians are fairly common, so maybe it just hasn't come up. Also, this specifically relates to support for a processor that probably isn't used outside of Russian defense contracts that specify local components, because there's literally no other reason to use it. I don't think anyone will look to remove contributions from Russian citizens to linux or KDE or whatever.



Comparing microsoft's dodgy business practices and indiscriminate shelling of a city is absurd.

Right, organ harvesting and concentration camps, forced castration(which also counts as genocide!) is literally better than fair war between "brother"(not anymore!) nations.

[dimko]

Why though? Are they part of some list that forces companies to not engage in business with them? Or is it just arbitrary selection on whims?

exactly that, US export law prohibits some technologies been sold to some countries. Encryption is one of them.

[coder]

It should be removed just for diffrent reason.

Not political, but simply that there isn't "free" userspace that can use it. There isn't a reason why OpenBLAS developers are supposed to maintain it, or even accept upstream of that unless those processors reach public use.

That's a twisting of the definition used by the kernel, which you seem to be referencing. Even the kernel doesn't have a standard that supported hardware must be broadly commercially-available.

Why I should maintain something so niche?

It's a question each software project must come to terms with. I think it generally comes down to a hope that expanding the user community & hardware support will result in more fixes & features being upstreamed. There's probably some sort of self-interest angle, or else they would eventually burn out and go unmaintained.

[er888kh]

Why though? Are they part of some list that forces companies to not engage in business with them? Or is it just arbitrary selection on whims?

I think ssokolow is right: because exporting some technologies, especially cryptography, is restricted by US EAR.

On the other hand, on the bottom of that page, it also says some parts are public domain and those restrictions do not apply to them.

I think it's somehow related to redhat too. Such a restriction would make more sense for a big commercial project than something like fedora.

[dimko]

I think it's somehow related to redhat too. Such a restriction would make more sense for a big commercial project than something like fedora.

I think its to do with actual sale. If RHEL/IBM was non profit it would be different story.

[er888kh]

Right, organ harvesting and concentration camps, forced castration(which also counts as genocide!) is literally better than fair war between "brother"(not anymore!) nations.

There is no such thing as human rights that the goverments care about. Only money talks. And as far as economics go, both Saudi Arabia and China are really important and thus not big threats to (the imaginary) global freedom.

[vladpetric]

Actually Russia was developing cheap easily mas produced CPU for a decade or so. Reason was not to depend on US hardware, that can contain hardware exploits. And 7-8 years later US CPUs started to have fun exploits like Spectre and what not.
Said CPU were to be somewhat i386 compatible if remember correctly, good enough for office/official use and some military application. Not to replace CPU for business/gaming etc. Albeit, cheap Elbrus processors can probably do Open Office and whatever normies do in the office.

Yeah but you're better off running stuff on cheap snapdragons ...

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/russias-biggest-bank-tests-elbrus-cpu-finds-it-unacceptable

And it's not that you can't have timing attacks on Elbrus processors ... more like, nobody will ever care. BTW, timing attacks like Spectre are incredibly difficult to pull off to begin with even on Intel, which was the hardest hit.

[patstew]

Right, organ harvesting and concentration camps, forced castration(which also counts as genocide!) is literally better than fair war between "brother"(not anymore!) nations.

If I had to spend tonight in Kharkiv or Xinjiang, I know what I'd choose. What's going on in Xinjiang is awful (though often overstated), but it's not as bad as being rained on by a MLRS.