Linux Kernel Networking Driver Development Impacted By Russian Sanctions

[SvenK]

See my previous post though. The US tends to favor cooperation with "invaded" countries, and usually just liberates them from tyrants which disallow them to have freedom in the first place. Russia can't favor cooperation because nobody in their sane state of mind cooperates with tyrannical regimes. That's why they annex and colonize. They work on domination.

Well that wasn't the case in Vietnam (they had to stop communism) and iraq (even the UN knew they had not have weapons of mass destruction), the US just wanted that war. In Vietnam they started into the war aside the french colonial power.

However if we look at the total death tools, than probably the chinese would win that with their cultural revolution, which caused 70 Million deaths.

[post-factum]

It looks like some comments are getting deleted, so I'm removing myself from this conversation.

[SvenK]

What a ridiculous statement. Yeah, I'm sure these network driver devs are the same people fighting the war... And considering they're being paid to give out FLOSS software, it's not like accepting their merge request is directly helping the people who are actually fighting the war.

If this really had any significant impact on aiding Russia's conflict, we wouldn't know this code exists.

They can still download the source code, so why is it important that they can't commit to it? It makes absolutely no sense.

[MorrisS.]

The responsibility for this war is not on putin himself only but on all moscovians. Without their support he wouldn't be able to start it.

Part of Russians fears putin, the other part needs a master to survive their inability to manage a Democracy which means responsibility of citizens. Indeed, it's more simple to chose to be slaves because of egoism, than to assume responsibilities. Russians are used to stay under tyranny from Zar period to putin era except for a short interval thanks to Gorbaciov. Peoples that need one individual makes decisions on general interests are not mature peoples. Democracy is common responsibility by awareness from which to get real freedom. People of representative democracies are improving, people under tyranny aren't able if not via revolutions. putin doesn't like Russian people he subordinates, if not for his aims indeed every day hundreds of Russians die for his arrogance in a war only his regime and he want, even if he avoids some trip fearing to be assassinated. Real democracy is much more than an institutional form of State, it is the way a person is subject of rights, in order to proof the respect its own person deserve to get, it's the way a person is able to affirm its life is worth as sovereign subject as well as part of a community able to act synergically in benevolence, instead of being object of tyranny. So real democracy is a spiritual perspective linked by Life value. People which need a master to survive to themselves are walking dead.

[gotar]

Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya were much better off before

Vietnam was not - it was a proxy war with China, they were already doomed.
In Iraq the Sunni were better, but at the expense of Shia.
Afghanistan - this is a consequence of Soviet–Afghan war, where indeed USA did the worst job possibie supporting Mujahideens.
Libyan war was started by civilians (17 February Revolution), it was not some outer invasion.

[kpedersen]

Possibly a little off topic but in some ways, I wonder what the fallout would be if future open-source licenses (i.e GPL5, BSD(oversimplified), sMIT) had a clause in them that "none of this code is allowed to be used for weapons or wars".

Would this even be enforceable?

Would governments / defence contractors just use it anyway and perhaps open-source lawyers could take potshots out of them; potentially injecting that "compensation" money back into open-source communities.

[user1]

We do have personal contact with these people.

Not sure what you mean here

Then you do support the regime. That's by definition. And there will be consequences.
That's the point of the sanctions - what would you want, is that the sanctions didn't impact anybody. Then they wouldn't be the sanctions.

Still disagree. I may work for that company and still oppose the government. Don't know about you, but I generally think collective punishments are unjust. Also, can you give an example in history when sanctions really worked? At least now it doesn't seem they're working on Russia.

Oh, because they've named it like this, then it must be the true!
ROTFL It's only some newspeak to manipulate people (and it's working pretty well as we see).

We had "Polish People's Republic" during the dark ages of USSR and it had nothing to do with res publica.

You need to learn some history. Keywords: Lenin, political international, Great October Socialist Revolution, Second International, Communist International (Comintern), Trotskyism, Voroshilov, Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili (in that order give or take).

You're desparately trying to prove my worldview is related to communism. All I said is I want to cancel all countries so that people will live in peace together. But I know it's impossible to achieve this because humanity is tribal by its nature unfortunately. That's why I mentioned that this worldview is utopic.

[q2dg]

So dumb!

[AsciiWolf]

Wow, this is really pathetic.

[schmidtbag]

One thing he’s accomplished is getting this forum, and hopefully others, to confront the issue of open source and warfare. It’s been shown that Russia has used open source to aid the war effort. And I think it should be emphasized that this is a war of aggression, a war of colonization.

It's obvious that Russia would use open-source code developed by others for their own gain; that's a given, and just the nature of how that works. What matters more is whether there are any examples where Russia is contributing to open source to aid the war effort.
I really can't comprehend a way where this merge request has any significant impact on their war effort. The code is already made and they already have it - merging it in the kernel just makes it so anyone who isn't Russian (but somehow has their hardware) gets to use it.

Some propose that this is not a concern of open source, that it is just an ideal of cooperation between individuals. Jakub is one of those individuals, and it seems his actions are influenced by his conscience. I commend him. I wish more people would act on their conscience. Blindly following an ideal is folly.

His influence is misguided. It's like the saying "don't shoot the messenger" - the messenger might be allied with your enemy and provides you with something you don't necessarily want, but you're just making things worse if you punish or disregard the messenger. The fact of the matter is, the source code is already public. The hardware it is for already exists. Russians are still going to use it regardless of it being mainstreamed. So, the only outcome of Jakub's actions is making it harder for anyone using the hardware and isn't using Russia's distros/repos.
Anyway, I agree blindly following is folly, but I would argue that denying Russian source code "because it's Russian" is doing exactly that. You don't have to like Russia or their actions (I sure don't) to realize that rejecting something purely on principle is not necessarily productive to your cause.