No one’s owed anything, but it’s in the collective interest to unite - without borders.
Russia is growing reliant on Linux, and it is heavily unlikely they’ll poison their own waters. Now Russian state and companies will just fork it for their needs, leaving mainline kernel worse off.
Russians are a diverse set of people, many of whom (especially relatively young IT crowd) are super not cool with what Russia is doing and have 0 intention to do anything murky in its interest.
And I’m growing tired of people imagining Russians can just come out on the street and end this for good, but somehow don’t want to or something. Any coordination of people is broken and de facto outlawed. Protesters are jailed within about a minute of protesting. People are scared for their families.
All this also ignores the fact that other world forces can have every intention to backdoor and hurt Linux as well, yet Russia in particular is the scapegoat. Linus just made sure Linux is now part of the proclaimed “West”, even though it was never attacked or forced to pick any sides whatsoever, and even Russia the state held absolutely nothing against it.
As per visas - not only would US lose out on a lot of talented folks that could benefit it (and not Russia, mind you!), it’s also too big of a political center. There was an occasion when the US didn’t want to allow in Russian diplomats that were heading for the United Nations HQ. Is that alright in your eyes?
But like you say, they can just fork it. So let them do that. What’s the problem? Everything else is kind of out of context.
The problem is mainline Linux will now not receive collaboration efforts from Russians, which will influence the speed and course of its development.
Not saying Linux is gonna stall without Russians, but they do have a measurable impact on open-source development and introduce a lot of exotic things into the kernel, which allows it to be used with more devices and accelerates development of alternative technologies.
It’s a lose-lose situation.
Besides, seeing other contributors removed for seemingly nothing but their nationality might disincentivise developers in other countries, too.
Just factually wrong. Russian maintainers were removed from their positions. They are still allowed to contribute, but they’ll have to get a non-Russian maintainer to sign off on it. This removes “FSB coerces Russian maintainer into signing off on malware” as an attack vector, while having the minimum possible impact on Russian contributors whose code will be checked for correctness like anyone else’s.
