Down payment on a bribe.

Um, really? Darwinism is now the dividing line between right wing and liberal? Hitler was a liberal? Are you unaware of how Nazi propaganda equated Jews with wealthy bankers and merchants to harness class resentment?

I’m not saying he is Hitler, but your bar for right wing is pretty damning of the American educational system.

It’s an amazingly accurate stereotype that right wingers change their opinion on an issue the moment it impacts them. I’m sure you’re on track with his motive, but that doesn’t make him a liberal.

There is a lot more than liking right wing media figures. Class solidarity is a bit of a stretch since his family wealth is closer to what that CEO had than most Americans.

Is the enemy of my enemy my friend? Maybe. I’m just not sure this guy is a great banner carrier. I respect your opinion and realize I’m in the minority. I’d be much happier if he was never caught. I don’t desire to see him punished, but I don’t see it being helpful if he gets painted as the next Ted Kaczynski. His background is just not helpful.

It’s worth noting that we don’t know exactly why they called the cops. It appears the cops didn’t know who he was until they had him pull down his mask. I’m guessing he was quite the sight after several days on the run, and probably several nights without much sleep.

I respect your take, but you’d probably be surprised how many lefties are proficient with firearms. It’s liberals that generally hate guns, although even that’s less true in the US. Marx himself was adamant that workers should retain the right to own firearms.

The SRA Socialist Rifle Association has over 10k members in the US. Not exactly the 5m members of the NRA, but I’ll bet there are more lefties in the NRA than the SRA, just because it is so ubiquitous.

I said “seems” because only bits of information have come out and there as been very little analysis. That said, Rational National has the best take I’ve seen so far.

https://youtu.be/FXhEBSQRI3Y

Meh, it seems he was just another right wing douchebag who got radicalized when it impacted him. As much as I like a keystone cops story, I don’t much care that he got caught - even though the CEO had it coming. Maybe his buddy Elon will have Trump write him a pardon.

Some people just want to watch the world burn.

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?