Russian coders blocked from contributing to FOSS tools:
The Reg has seen two recent incidents of Russian developers being blocked from public development of FOSS code. One was a refusal on the Linux kernel mailing list, the other a more general block on Github. In the last week, these events have both caused active, and sometimes heated, discussions in FOSS developer communities.
The GitHub account of developer Alexander Amelkin has been blocked, and his repositories marked as "archived" – including ipmitool, whose README describes it as "a utility for managing and configuring devices that support the Intelligent Platform Management Interface." Unable to comment on Github itself, Amelkin described what happened on the project's older Soureforge page:
Sorry to say, but on March 1st without any prior notice or any explanation whatsoever, GitHub has suspended my personal account and made orphan all the projects that I owned/maintained.
That includes ipmitool and frugen.
This mailing list and the old sourceforge project page are the only means of communication with you that I have left. I am currently searching for a way to unblock my GitHub or (less preferably) migrate ipmitool once again to another less hostile service.
Amelkin works for Russian chipbuilder Yadro, which we described as working on RISC-V chips back in 2021. Microsoft is just obeying US law in this: according to the War and Sanctions database of the Ukrainian National Agency on Corruption Prevention, the NACP, Yadro is a sanctioned company.
However, on LinkedIn, Amelkin disputes his employer's involvement:
You may rest assured that this "sanctioned corporation" takes no part in this awful war, and even if making civilian server products can be viewed as somehow taking part, that part is definitely far less than what, say, BMW or Bosch took in WW2, yet nobody seems to have cancelled them or at least remembered what they've done, let alone their individual employees. All this is stupid, xenophobic and racist. Especially you labelling me as a terrorist on the basis of my ethnicity.
Over on Hacker News, commentators seem to be generally in favor of the move, although the discussion on LWN is more measured, pointing out both that there is little threat from server-management tools like this, but that Microsoft probably has no choice.
Amelkin is not alone. Over on the Linux Kernel Mailing List, a contribution from Sergey Semin has been refused with the terse notice:
We don't feel comfortable accepting patches from or relating to hardware produced by your organization.
Please withhold networking contributions until further notice.
Semin is a developer at chipmaker Baikal Electronics, a company whose website has been suspended for a year now, as we noted a year ago in a story that also mentions Yadro. We were reporting on Baikal's efforts to develop its own CPUs nearly a decade ago, mere months after the Russian annexation of Crimea. And once again, there is spirited debate over the move on the Orange Site.
Last summer, the Reg FOSS desk speculated whether renewed Russian investment in Linux as a result of Western sanctions might result in improvements and patches flowing back upstream. It looks like the answer here is an increasingly firm no, but not because Russian developers aren't offering them. They are — but their efforts are being rebuffed.
[...] This seems backward to us: the aim of sanctions is to impose additiuonal costs on the bad activities of hostile nations, or to cause them to reconsider their bad behavior. The aim is to make these countries better behaved and more cooperative with others. Code sharing is good behavior: it takes effort to share your code, and it benefits everyone with whom it is shared. Refusing code contributions because they are from aggressive actors does not hurt or hinder any Russian organization. It doesn't matter what uses the companies offering it have for the code they are sharing. It's irrelevant if the uses are military or peaceful civilian ones.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Thexalon on Friday March 24, @10:38AM (3 children)
It's good behavior if the code you're sharing is good code and not malware. And there have been indications of the Russian government funding efforts to insert malware into FOSS distribution streams such as PyPi that would aid in their spying efforts.
Under those circumstances, it's understandable that there would be a bit of wariness about just accepting that code right now.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Friday March 24, @11:46AM (2 children)
> Russian government funding efforts to insert malware into FOSS distribution streams
Wasn't the US doing this as well not so long ago?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Rich on Friday March 24, @12:04PM (1 child)
We can only guess. The Debian deterministic random generator bug would be worth of the NSA. The "goto fail" issue in Mac OS X almost looks too pedestrian for them, maybe the CIA?. And the "NSAKEY" in Windows is so primitive that it's probably from the Russians, trying to shed bad light on the NSA to have them defunded.
(Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Friday March 24, @03:30PM
That might work if we ever get a president who would swear an oath to uphold and defund the constitution.
How often should I have my memory checked? I used to know but...
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday March 24, @06:19PM (1 child)
I'm moving my netstat based utilities over to use ss because the community has "deprecated netstat in favor of ss."
ss was written by Alexey Kuznetsov, .
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday March 24, @06:22PM
Try again:
ss was written by Alexey Kuznetsov, kuznet@ms2.inr.ac.ru
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 24, @08:44PM (1 child)
Unless you move out of Russia and declare you don't support the criminal regime of Russia, why should you be given a free pass like nothing's going on?
Ukrainians are fighting for their lives, civilians are being killed and worse intentionally by Russians and we should just accept Russians being in our communities being quiet about the atrocities?
Fuck that. This continuing Russian aggression needs to be dealt with.
Slava Ukraini! Slay the orcs!
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 24, @11:07PM
Looks like i hit the nerve of some ruski troll puppet.
Slava Ukraini! Burn in hell orc!
(Score: 2) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Friday March 24, @11:50PM (1 child)
This man, like many others in Russia, in America or in any other country, today as in the past, has discovered that war is fucking dumb.
War is waged by a teeny tiny number of human beings in charge, and a small misguided minority that drank the Kool Aid and supports them, while the VAST majority of the populations in the countries at war don't want any of it: all they want is earn an honest living and raise their children in a safe environment. That's all most people want.
Most Ukrainians have nothing against the Russians and just wanted to lead a happy and decent life
Most Russians don't want their army to invade Ukraine and would rather pursue their open-source projects.
Most Germans didn't want their army to invade Poland or Czechoslovakia and wanted to live in peace.
Most Americans didn't want their army to invade Hawaii and just wanted to live in peace.
Most Spaniards didn't want their king to kill millions in the Americas and just wanted to live in peace.
...
But... most people have to suffer the vagaries of their leaders.
Why we let a few sumbitches and their cronies ruin the lives of millions over and over and over, I'll never know.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 25, @04:53PM
Assumptions are often the key. See, most Russians on both - Russian and Ukrainian side of the border - view the war as the US attacking them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 25, @12:30AM (3 children)
Everybody talks like Afghanistan/Iraq/etc never happened, I guess when we invade countries it's perfectly ok
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 25, @10:10AM (2 children)
In the EU it's better :)
In the exact same news broadcast:
- Migrants are bad if we sacked them from their houses while doing war in Iraq/Afghanistan/Islamic countries.
- Migrants are good if Russians sacked them from their houses while doing war in Ukraine.
- A lot of them are the same migrants, they come to the EU through boundary points located ~10km from each other - one in the Belarus, the second in the Ukraine.
- When foreign Muslims came from a lot of countries to defend their country and destroying Colonial-like politics, it is bad.
- When foreign Europeans came from a lot of countries defending Ukraine and destroying Soviet-like politics, it is good.
I found that this is an insult to the logic. Every country has the right to defend itself from the invasion. This is a basic principle of operation of every country. Personally, I am usually more with these oppressed countries, so I was called a terrorist or even murder propagator before. Then, boom, doing the same thing makes you a hero.
Everyone has some "corpse in the wardrobe". The problem is that currently manifesting it is literally making people from many EU countries hate both their government, media and countries themselves. Literally "double-think" from 1984 goes right on our eyes.
(Score: 2) by gnuman on Sunday March 26, @10:38AM (1 child)
The thing is, most people don't move because of war. They move because they want to have a better life. Your simplistic way of thinking is simply sad.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 27, @12:47AM
Yeah, a better life without war.. duh! Besides, that's not what the poster was taking about. Perhaps you need to reread
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Saturday March 25, @10:33AM
What if an extra layer of peer review is installed, so these people could still contribute, but all of their work has to be reviewed before it's accepted? It seems like such a waste to simply dismiss them without knowing if they're actually 'evil'.
(Score: 2) by Nobuddy on Saturday March 25, @04:01PM (1 child)
And the sanctions are not just war support companies, it is financial sanctions against the oligarchs. Cutting off those who get rich through putins dictatorship- regardless of the avenue that dirty money takes to reach them.
(Score: 2) by legont on Saturday March 25, @05:12PM
There is, roughly, a parity of investments. All the Russian moneys abroad are about the same as Western moneys in Russia. If all for all exchange is ever decided, nobody wins or loses. Yes, it's likely that different people will inherit the balances. Obviously, all the economies - peoples everywhere - will suffer.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 3, Informative) by gnuman on Sunday March 26, @10:32AM
So, this is Github issue, which comes under US jurisdiction and Microsoft, and not FOSS..
What is sad Microsoft was just saying that FOSS is not suppose to be about politics with their Iran stance
https://github.blog/2021-01-05-advancing-developer-freedom-github-is-fully-available-in-iran/ [github.blog]
It simply means that one should not use github for projects where you have maintainers in countries under sanctions. Basically, it's going back to email and your own website to host your work. Also, Github is NOT FOSS.