Linus Torvalds kicked the Russians out of Linux, now they're creating a sovereign Linux community in Russia — Ministry of Digital Development steps in

moe90@feddit.nl to Technology@lemmy.world – 292 points –
Linus Torvalds kicked the Russians out of Linux, now they're creating a sovereign Linux community in Russia — Ministry of Digital Development steps in
tomshardware.com
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They weren't kicked out, iirc. Their contributions just aren't automatically merged anymore

And they are all welcome back if they can satisfy the Linux Foundation that they're not affiliated with a sanctioned entity on the SDN list.

But that headline is provocative, it gets people going.

Does it? Russians can't do Russian stuff anymore isn't really controversial.

It is somewhat chucking the baby out with the bath water but I doubt anyone's losing sleep over it.

No, this is clearly evil and racist and true nazism, and we must reverse it even though it doesn't hurt anybody but the west, and therefore Russia actually wants it, but not really?

I'm sorry, the talking points are confusing here, can I have my lines again?

They were removed from the maintainer position of whatever they did. Bizarre enough.

For being employees of sanctioned companies...

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Oh noes, I bet lemmy.ml users all switch.

And nothing of value was lost

Except their privacy—oh they didn’t have it to begin with.

You can’t lose something you never had

Isn't the point that they like a dictatorial government? Presumably they're okay with their every move being watched.

They like it because they either work for it or hope to work for it and be in a position of power.

Considering how many trans folks exist on those instances, they think they are one of the "good ones".

Da fuq?

Surely you've realised your instance has a huge pro-russian, pro-china tankie presence?

Lemmy.ml admins me for being against Russia invading Ukraine and committing genocide lmao

If you aren't a tankie, migrating your account could be something to consider.

"Fuck the white supremacist reddit anti-tankie admins", I'll start my own reddit with blackjack and hookers at lemmy.marxist-leninist to host /r/communism - the creator of Lemmy and admin of lemmy.ml.

This is why I was secretly rooting for Aether to take off instead of Lemmy.

Yeah, people warned me before I joined and I dismissed it, after a year here I realize how bad it is.

Do you agree that the CCP was responsible for thousands of deaths during the Tiananmen Square massacre? Do you agree that China is committing genocide against the Uyghurs?

If you agree, think you might agree, or don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about, you shouldn’t be on lemmy.ml

Yes to both. I absolutely despise both country's governments because of their actions. However mirroring the government's actions to individuals living in a country does not seem fair. I fucking hate my country's president, and would celebrate it if he died. Why should I get judged based on his actions?

No one's judging you based on his actions, they're judging you based on your actions. That being to have your account on an instance that supports those actions.

You’re not being judged. We are letting you know what your instance is really about. Stay if you want, but you don’t align with it.

I think it should be rephrased. 95% of people on lemmy.ml are probably sane, but since all their moderators are insane, it makes it look like everyone there agrees with them

Eh the massacring happened on side streets, local Peking residents were trying to keep the army from moving into the square not really knowing that other Peking residents had already briefed the army on who the protesters actually were, and what they wanted, and how they behaved. Once the army was on the square and set an ultimatum it was cleared with no or few casualties, the reports are a bit fuzzy.

That doesn't excuse the CCP in one bit, of course, or rather it doesn't excuse the hardline faction who couldn't stomach that others in the party were actually talking to the protesters as that would set a precedent that you can just turn up on the square and get an audience with the party, or maybe more precisely could boost the influence of one party faction over the whole.

The whole situation really can't be divorced from Hu Yaobang and his role in the party: The protests were essentially a wake for him and his ideas. Which the hardliners thoroughly buried afterwards and the situation in China hasn't improved to the point where Chinese would even be comfortable to criticise that decision -- you'd get invited for tea, if you can catch on to the euphemism.

If it had been up to the hardliners yes the army would've massacred the whole square, if that hadn't been their intention they wouldn't have mischaracterised the nature of the protest towards the army. Without ordinary Peking citizens stepping in, and getting butchered for it, that massacre would have happened.

And yes the Uygur situation is a genocide that's without question or asterisk.

The massacre is not and has never been limited to the square. It was the event.

Don’t say any of that on lemmy.ml haha

See there's the stuff that happened, there's the version that tankies want to believe (complete denial), which is actually different from the official CCP stance ("necessary and proportionate police action to ensure stability", with the implication "enough questions, comrade, nothing more to see"), which is different from western public... myth, I have to say. Back when the stuff went down western journalists didn't know what was happening, there were confusing reports, there were reports of violence, and then there was the tank man -- taken the day after (IIRC, but definitely later and no he didn't get run over). The collective imagination somehow constructed an image of the Chinese army rolling over students. Which is... metaphorically true, but not literally. And then the CCP is using that western imagination to spin their own tale of how the evil west is slandering them.

There have been plenty of years to get to the bottom of it, and I’m pretty sure the bottom of it has been found.

Truthfully, if anyone can give an independent first hand report about the treatment of Uyghurs in China (that is not coming from propaganda vehicles like the Victims of Communism Foundation), I would be most interested.

No, I am not saying this in rebuttal to anything.

You mean something like the UN Human Rights Office report that concluded "China responsible for ‘serious human rights violations’ in Xinjiang province"?

Yes. Though serious human rights violations are not the same as genocide and concentrations camps, as both the above poster and Victims of Communism Foundation wants us to believe.

That means in no way that those violations are acceptable.

And, likewise, the UN stating that serious human rights violations occurred is not the same as them all saying they aren't committing genocide

No, but I am not the one making statements. I only asked for sources that supported those made by others.

"allegations of patterns of torture, or ill-treatment, including forced medical treatment and adverse conditions of detention, are credible, as are allegations of individual incidents of sexual and gender-based violence."

And this is from what China let them see.

Individual incidents of sexual and gender-based violence are horrible, but not nearly the same as sexual violence employed on scale through genocidal concentration camps, which is claimed by US propaganda machines. Individual incidents of sexual violence unfortunately happen everywhere, and pretending otherwise is wilful ignorance of an endemic problem for the purpose of, what I have to assume is, an underlying agenda. Stop moving the goal post and stop using reductive argumentation to score cheap shots at China. If China really is as bad as claimed, which I am not categorically refuting, then make the proper case for it.

Any case you'll say it's not first hand and therefore invalid.

You also seem to have narrow attention span. Seems the bit about torture, forced medical treatments, detention... Somehow eluded you. You saw the word "individual" and held to that like a Chinese state doctor holds a healthy kidney.

But that happens everywhere, am I right?

Yet here you are, taking about some hypothetical "US propaganda machine", without making s proper case for it.

This brand of deflection, "well, I'm not denying, but we can't say for certain, and actually everywhere there are issues" isn't new nor very effective. You might need to update your training data, give it a few more cycles. At least don't throw it back to back in the conversion, jus much more noticeable that way.

The fuck? Who are you to say who should be on lemmy.ml? Just because I don't agree with some of the people that doesn't mean I shouldn't be here.

Get the fuck out of here with that segregation bullshit. I don't want an instance that defederate from everything I don't agree with.

You missed the point. He's saying if you hold those positions, then your account isn't safe there. I just avoid the .ml servers in general because of their heavy handed and politically charged moderating. Admins and power mods ruined reddit, I'd recommend not committing the same mistakes here.

.ml servers started the segregationist bullshit with their moderating. I'd also be interested in what your stance was on most every server defederating with exploding heads and burggit back last year.

I don't know anything about exploding heads and burggit but I assume they are right-leaning/alt-right. Like lemmygrad but the "opposite?) I am against defederation in general. I like to be exposed to different opinions and I am fully capable to use my brain to not become an extremist.

That said, I don't agree with either the extremist left or right.

You seem to be basing your defense of your instance on the misguided belief that they don't defederate from people. I'd look into that if I were you.

I am against defederation in general. I like to be exposed to different opinions and I am fully capable to use my brain to not become an extremist.

Then why the shit are you on an instance that is against all of that lol?

If your stance is to have no or minimal defederation then lemmy.ml is not the right choice, lemm.ee is: Compare blocked instances here with the same here. Besides lemmy.ml apparently not cleaning up their blocks (e.g. exploding-heads is defunct) they block e.g. lemmynsfw.com. Not really political that's just one that I recognised.

Also I couldn't find a federation policy for lemmy.ml, while lemm.ee has clear rules.

I never knew that. Thanks for the information! I will make an account on lemm.ee

Either you do not know anything about your instance, or you disagree with my comments about China. Which one is it?

they're projecting.

they want to destroy anyone that doesn't share their opinions on their instance and assume that's what happens here.

Getting banned on your instance for trying to have a good faith discussion because you guys are offended by it is kinda fucked.

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Oh so That's why they are offline :-D !

They probably blocked that user since all he does is spam anti .ml propaganda on .world.

All while .world admins remove any criticism of their instance for "instance bashing".

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Anything involving a ministry in Russia is not a serious plan. They'll receive funding, hire a couple of bash script writers, well, maybe a couple of people who'll write drivers for Elbrus, Baikal or something that's sort of developed and produced in Russia, but nobody really uses it even in governmental structures.

One notable software business professional interviewed by RBC thought that the West’s decision would “adversely affect the life of the developer community, mutual trust within it, and therefore the quality of the product.”

It was Russia and other autocracies etc. that diminished the trust by actually financing developers for multiple years to first earn trust and finally introduce backdoors into open source software, as demonstrated by the XZ utils backdoor.

In open source projects, maintainers need to have some initial trust into each contributor, and let this trust naturally grow with time and contributions. They cannot perform intensive background checks on everyone before accepting a patch.

While it is easier to uncover backdoors in open source software, there is no good way to defend and prevent against this kind of attack in this type of development process. All open source projects can do is trying to take away some trust from people within higher risk groups. This of course might lead to discrimination.

There is a theory that sanctions against a country with a tyrannical ruler hurt the common people more than the oligarchs / dictator. But eventually they do make life more difficult for that ruler

The common people are the ones who overthrow the dictator eventually

That happens relatively rarely. Remember the protests in recent years in Thailand, Hong Kong, Iran? They went exactly nowhere.

TF you on? Just because there weren’t immediate, drastic regime level changes doesn’t mean they went “exactly nowhere”.

There have been many changes at smaller levels not being reported in mainstream western media. Public pressure called for MANY local officials to step down along with changes in law that have already started effecting everyday life, and at least in Thailand, some pretty major changes in how public officials are held accountable via more expansive auditing channels, thereby increasing transparency.

Not everything is a fucking hollywood movie wherein you have some Hunger Games style uprising against the elite.

In fact, it’s fucking insulting hearing people who haven’t an ounce of global exposure beyond whatever 2 or 3 media sources they shove their heads into saying “those protesters got nothing accomplished”.

Never let anyone tell you protesting doesn’t work.

Absolutely nothing happened in Iran. The morality police was given some practice in beating up teenagers and young adults for a couple of months, but the protests went exactly nowhere.

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It could have worked. It was worth trying

But not if the pressure is mostly coming from the external. Or worse if we look at Egypt, where now an even worse dictator than Mubarak rules, after the Egyptians have elected people the West didn't like, and getting couped quickly.

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Iraq Afghanistan North Korea

So only 3-4 left to go :-)

Jk

But letting the dictator free reign is even worse, look at how many people putin has killed in the unnecessary agression of Ukraine. That's not some slight "suffering", that's death and everything that comes with it for the families left behind.

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Where are the tankie posts now?

Well confined in their instances for now. Wait until .ml and the Grad starts overflowing.

wait is there problem with .ml ? I've been using this account for more than an year. Is that the reason I see hexbear posts (I want to block this instance, but don't think it's possible from account)

To put it lightly, the instance owner is sympathetic to grad and hexbear.

It is actually possible to block an instance with your account. I heard Voyager and vanilla Lemmy allow this

found it, thanks for pointing it (I use Voyager). I may move instance if it's possible

.ml is basically Lemmygrad cosplaying as moderate. Your admins (the devs of Lemmy) are literal Tankies, your news community is full of disinformation and bans anyone who's spreading anti Tankie related comments, like the truth about Russia or China, or pro Western views.

!meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works ctrl + f for .ml or use the search function and note the pinned threads.

I originally created account on .ml cause it's instance by devs. I will try to see how to switch instance (with all my content)

Omg I bet lemmygrad is crying in their panties!

It was the right move, but this needs to be expanded. Assume there are state actors from all of the major countries installing backdoors.

The digital war front will be getting hit from all sides. We need extreme paranoia to protect all of the innocent bystanders. Don’t assume even your own country is trustworthy in this.

Don’t assume even your own country is trustworthy in this.

My country is one of the world leaders in mass spying software development and even gave themselves the right to basically do deep packet inspections on everything going through it a long time ago, so...

I’m pretty certain my country banned Kaspersky because they kept outing western backdoors and malware. And I would bet my life that Windows has supported free use government backdoors since at least Windows 10.

I think you made a typo, did you mean Windows 1.0 😝

It's a shame they didn't consider moving the LF foundation to Europe or something. If the choice is kick out contributors to support sanctions or operate without political pressure, the second is far better.

I cannot stand Putin or Russia's action, but punishing individual contributors just trying to write code and build Linux isn't helpful.

Unless evidence is found of malicious commits, it is pretty harsh on those caught up with this.

Let's remember that many Russians will probably be locked up and/or killed for coming out against Putin. Punishing them achieves nothing.

They removed russian maintainers that are associated with sanctioned companies. Individual russian contributers were unaffected by this.

They removed russian maintainers that are associated with sanctioned companies

Your are voluntarily spreading fake news and you are getting upvoted for that !

They have removed every person they suspected to be russian or have a russian ".ru" domain name in their email from the maintainers list.

Sorry bot, only those working for companies under sanction. And this doesn't mean they can't contribute, just that their contributions need to be approved by someone else.

But I'm pretty sure the Russian git repo will allow us based Microsoft employees be on the mantainers list... Right? Russia state is nothing if not honest, consistent and imperi... friendly with other nations

Moving to Europe where... there's an even greater level of sanctions against Russia, and the population is more anti-Russia?

I mean sure, I'd like that, but it wouldn't have the effect you want it to lmao

And no, maintainers for sanctioned Russian companies were removed from their positions (where they can push kernel changes with zero approval).

Now they have to wait for their changes to be approved like everybody else. Oh no the horror.

To my complete lack of surprise, Russia is seems to be a freer country for free software developers than the United States.

And this is based on what

The fact that Russia does not remove maintainers for political reasons.

Bro… Russia arrests protesters from the streets for committing the crime of holding up blank sheets of paper… Russia throws people in jail for political reasons all the time. How are those the actions of the free country? I have a trans friend living in Russia right now who is literally unable to speak about being trans online because she might be accused of “spreading lgbtq+ propaganda”.

The funniest story about this is that time AST (Russian book publisher) literally redacted the text of a biography about an openly-gay Italian director called Pier Paolo Pasolini in order to comply with Russian anti-gay “propaganda” laws… and then published it with the redactions clearly visible:

Literally redacted lmao. Does this scream “free country” to you?

This whole discussion exists because the USA aren't a free country either, or else the US-based Linux Foundation would not have to act like it does, I thought?

This discussion exists because dumbass Russian apologists won't shut up about it

I encourage you to google the paradox of tolerance, because you sound like a Fox News propagandist saying 'so much for the tolerant left am I right?'

Russia made its bed. The response from the US is exactly that - a response. Even the most tolerant society will HAVE TO be intolerant towards intolerance in order to exist.

You can understand this or not, I really don't care. But at least someone attempted to explain to you why you're getting buried in downvotes.

But at least someone attempted to explain to you why you’re getting buried in downvotes.

I'm old enough and have been on the internet long enough not to judge the value of my statements by how many thumbs up they get. With regard to global politics, however, I think it's perfectly reasonable to exchange arguments, and I find it regrettable that many people seem to think that pressing voting symbols is enough of an argument.

This isn't an argument or even a discussion. You're just beating a dead horse and the rest of us are sick of seeing it.

Is this excluding the bit where they made criticising their war in Ukraine punishable by up to 15 years in prison?

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To my complete lack of surprise, Russia is seems to be a freer country for free software developers than the United States.

What does the United States have to do with this? Since when is Finland part of the United States? Linus Torvalds is Finnish.

The Linux Foundation is headquartered in San Francisco. It's a US 501c non profit. Therefore, they must abide by US sanctions.

Linus Torvalds has been a US Citizen since 2010 and lives in Portland, Oregon

Remind me again what Russia did with your country the instant it got the chance?

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