I for one am going through quite a culture shock. I always assumed the nature of FOSS software made it immune to be confined within the policies of nations; I guess if one day the government of USA starts to think that its a security concers for china to use and contribute to core opensource software created by its citizens or based in their boundaries, they might strongarm FOSS communities and projects to make their software exclude them in someway or worse declare GPL software a threat to national security.
Nope. Politics is part of being open source.
As for US strong arming you don’t have to be a US company for them to do that. RISK-V and ASML have been targeted by them in the past to prevent Chinese use.
Yes. There is an extremely arbitrary distinction made between the USA and Russia. Both are known for injecting spyware. China is somehow still okay? It makes no sense.
Not to mention the elephant in the room by not banning another certain country actively committing war crimes.
All software should be safety checked. Where the maintainer is from should be irrelevant.
But the most weird aspect is the timing. Why now and not a few years ago?
China is somehow still okay?
China is too important a supplier to the West. Sanctions against them would lead to retaliatory sanctions against the West from China which would be economically devastating.
Obviously they are just as dangerous and as actively involved is espionage as the other world players, but they hold too many cards to risk escalation. The West is also too important to their economy to escalate beyond war games. At least - we all hope so.
There is an extremely arbitrary distinction made between the USA and Russia.
Your world view seems to be highly influenced by propaganda. It’s very easy to draw a distinction between these two countries. Let me start with an easy one:
Russia is a dictatorship, the US is a democracy.
US is a democracy
Lmfao
Modern Russia is a shitty liberal “democracy” just as incompetent as the US’s
I see why some people block lenny.ml. Many there put everything through a high-standard threshold function.
The commenter says as he repeats other propaganda.
The US is not and has never been a democracy. The US is an oligarchy.
Read The People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn.
At best, it was for a while a Representative Democracy. Where people gave their vote to other people to vote for them.
The fact that most Americans think the US is not an oligarchy, today, is a testament to the power of the State and their corporate media to propagandized their own citizens. It is very rich for them to point to other country’s Oligarchies and somehow absolutely fail to see their own. Or worse, call it some weird type of conspiracy to call out or point out reality.
I mean, it is not like it is not obvious if one takes a step back or two and looks at it objectively.
Your world view seems to be highly influenced by propaganda. A country ruled by two identical genocidal capitalist parties isn’t a “democracy”; it’s a capitalist dictatorship.
Any party genuinely wanting to advance working class causes will not be allowed to come to power through it (they won’t be funded by the capitalist backers that fund/control the two ruling parties to begin with), and anyone in power that happens to hurt the country’s imperial prowess will be disposed of by the ruling parties, the way JFK was assassinated for wanting to abolish the CIA and reducing US troops in the Middle East.
Read about Operation Condor. Its actions, repercussions and number of deaths due to it, and continue to pretend the USA follows Democratic Values™. And this is just but one example.
They are just better at PR than most. You are walking proof of it.
A KGB spy and a CIA agent meet up in a bar for a friendly drink
“I have to admit, I’m always so impressed by Soviet propaganda. You really know how to get people worked up,” the CIA agent says.
“Thank you,” the KGB says. “We do our best but truly, it’s nothing compared to American propaganda. Your people believe everything your state media tells them.”
The CIA agent drops his drink in shock and disgust. “Thank you friend, but you must be confused… There’s no propaganda in America.”
well yeah, how does us being democracy change the fact that they basically did almost everything that Russia did
“basically”
You’ll be surprised if you actually challenge your convictions.
Which one is killing us faster? I’m pretty sure it’s the USA. Nice that you get to live in a democracy I guess but that doesn’t mean a damn thing to someone living outside the USA and being exploited and abused by it.
I’m in Sweden. The idea that the US is somehow more of a danger to us than Russia is laughable.
It wasn’t a culture shock but it made something obvious that sometimes gets forgotten. The “Open” just means that one can look at the source code and copy it to make a new version. There is no obligation of the original creators to support things outside of what they want/can do.
Those kinds of problems aren’t particularly new (PGP comes to mind as an example back when you couldn’t export it out of the US), but it’s a reminder that a lot of open-source comes from the US and Europe and is subject to western nation’s will. The US is also apparently thinks China is “stealing” RISC-V.
To me that goes against the spirit of open-source, where where you come from and who you are shouldn’t matter, because the code is by the people for the people and no money is exchanged. It’s already out there in the open, it’s not like it will stop the enemy from using the code. What’s also silly about this is if the those people were contributing anonymously under a fake or generic name, nothing would have happened.
The Internet got ruined when Facebook normalized/enforced using your real identity online.
Not really, open source projects don’t necessarily have to be open to all contributors and I was aware of this already. They have to be open to anyone doing what they want with the code, by definition, which is good, but they don’t have to allow everyone to contribute to upstream. I’m not sure if there’s any particular defence against this being used in a discriminatory manner, but I do think this effect is significantly mitigated by the decentralised nature of open source and the fact that it’s not too uncommon for forks to become preferred over the original, the fact that open source projects rise and fall in popularity, etc.
I wonder if there’s some way to manage an open source project so that it’s not subject to particular national laws in this way.
It’s not decentralized on the level of project development, the visible proof of which is what we’ve seen happen.
How many times have you seen two branches of a significant project to coexist with comparable popularity?
I wonder if there’s some way to manage an open source project so that it’s not subject to particular national laws in this way.
Yes. Pseudonymous software development. I’ve seen Ross Ulbricht’s name today, so we also know the risks.
Naturally this is closer to some underground warez than to copyleft, because the legal ways of protecting copylefted information against appropriation will not be available. A different paradigm.
