Baikal is kind of a political project to start with.
They were already sanctioned by the Obama admin because they were "associated with military procurement activities, including the development of computer systems for military end-users and the production of computers for nuclear research". That was rescinded a year later. Now it's back for reasons that should be obvious.
You can ignore what's going on in the world and say that open source is completely detached from that, or you can say you're not comfterable going out of your way to include support for Russian processors for Russian arms. Clearly there is some point at which you can't ignore politics: few people would claim IBM did nothing wrong selling the Nazi regime equipment.
I don't know who the "we" is; you have to ask the person who sent that message. Presumably it's the people responsible for that code.
I explicitly mentioned IBM's involvement in the holocaust. But that's a historical event; not an on-going one. You can trace the genealogy of almost everyone an everything to something evil if you go back far enough.
I think comparing the Russian and US military is a false equivalence. Do I think the US is innocent? No. But it's just not on the same order.
> I think comparing the Russian and US military is a false equivalence. Do I think the US is innocent? No. But it's just not on the same order.
Of course. The US killings look almost "human" (Serbia, Irak, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Corea etc). And having other country's people killed just to follow US interest shows a lot of empathy. /s
War is always bad, messy, and rarely "clean", but comparing the toppling of fascist nutjobs like the Taliban to a completely unwarranted invasion of Ukraine is borderline bad faith, as is blaming the US for the Yugoslav wars (guess they should have just let the Serbs genocide the Bosnians and Albanians) or going back 75 years to the Korean war. By that standard we should also hold Stalin's purges against Russia for all perpetuity, or Japan, Germany, and Italy for the second world war. These thing are just not the same thing at all.
Afghanistan was ruled by a bunch of religio-fascist nutjobs.
Iraq was ruled by a genocidal dictator.
Does that mean those wars were a good idea? By my estimation, probably not, for a number of reasons. But they're not they're same thing at all as Russia's invasion of Ukraine. It's borderline bad-faith to even compare it.
I don't which other two you're referring to, but I'm willing to bet they're not the same thing at all either.
Do you realize how Orwellian it is that you cannot name some of the most prolific and brutal invasions that the #1 superpower has carried out during your own lifetime? This is basic historical literacy. Libya and Syria (ongoing) are the obvious ones you are missing.
Anyways, I'm not going to play the "let's take turns justifying the illegal invasions of distant sovereign countries" game.
United States never invaded Libya or Syria in the same way as Russia invaded Ukraine, or the US invaded Iraq. Both are essentially civil wars where the US was (and continues to be?) involved, but that's not the same thing as an invasion.
You can dismiss it as a "game", but the reasons and specifics of the situation DO matter. A lot. Denying this means, for example, that the Nazi invasion of Poland is just the same as the allied invasion of Nazi Germany. After all, both are foreign invasions in a sovereign country. No reasonable person would agree these situations are the same; the invasion in to Nazi territory was horrible because all war is, but was, in the end, a good thing. The same cannot be said about the invasion of Poland.
When you aggressively invade and destroy the government of a sovereign country, there is chaos, a power vacuum and civil war. This is what Washington did in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria (failed).
Arguing that Washington technically didn't invade any of these countries because there were already internal tensions is laughably stupid (what has been happening in Donbass since 2014?). Kindly knock it off.
"We came, we saw, he died" ~Hillary Clinton, speaking about our role using the CIA to oust Ghaddafi leading to his death by anal knifing and the resulting power vacuum that they still deal with today. Now in 2023 Libya has open air slave markets[1] and tons of missing uranium[2], another job well done. We have zero moral authority, that ship sailed decades ago.
Not really; I have plenty of quibbles with the GOP, but its nowhere near the Taliban. Your somewhat racist and sexist uncle is also not literally Hitler.
If you're going to count the US roles in interventions in Libya and Syria as "invading a sovereign country," it is only fair that you apply the same logic to Russia. This means you have to at least include Russian intervention in the Syrian civil war--which is larger than the US role in Libya or Syria, natch--and arguably it is fair to include interventions in which Wagner is a major player, which includes Libya, Mali, and the Central African Republic.
This is false. The Syrian government invited Russian assistance against the combined invading forces of US/Israel/Turkey/ISIS. Accepting an official invitation is by definition not an "invasion". Heck, Assad was in Moscow just days ago! You are out of your depth here.
I used the terminology "intervention", and not "invasion", for a reason.
If you're going to quibble, the US never sent any forces to Libya. France and the UK provided aerial support to a no-fly zone imposed by a UN resolution, with the US providing some naval support as well. So why does that qualify as an "invasion"?
(Actually, if you really want to quibble, Russia has invaded Ukraine twice in the past decade--the Russian invasion of Crimea/Donbass in 2014 should probably be counted as distinct from the invasion effort starting in 2022, given that they provided very different levels of support and had very different material war aims.)
> I think comparing the Russian and US military is a false equivalence. Do I think the US is innocent? No. But it's just not on the same order.
Seriously?
Setting aside those that the US was directly involved in such as Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, how about the war between and Iraq and Iran that the US urged Saddam Hussein on which resulted in about 500,000 dead, for starters? In those days Saddam was the bestie of the US so long as he stuck it to Iran.
How about the sanctions on medical supplies to Iraq which resulted in about 500,000 deaths of Iraqi children?
Have you forgotten about the invasion of Grenada and Panama that the US invaded to install governments after their own heart? Very much like Russia's invasion of Ukraine only those wars were very much shorter because of the overwhelming might of the US.
Sadly the war on Ukraine is lasting much longer because Ukraine has the support of the US, until the US decides that China warrants more attention.
> Sadly the war on Ukraine is lasting much longer because Ukraine has the support of the US, until the US decides that China warrants more attention.
... Sadly? I guess the Ukrainians should just bow over and welcome their new Russian overlords? Or what are you suggesting here?
I'm not going to comment on every single example, but in many there is significantly more nuance to most of them as I've explained in some other comments already. Does that mean it's "good"? Not necessarily, but it does mean it's just not the same as a completely unwarranted baseless invasion. The specifics of the situation DO matter and you can't just tally military interventions like that.
> ... Sadly? I guess the Ukrainians should just bow over and welcome their new Russian overlords? Or what are you suggesting here?
Life for the masses of the people is generally the same no matter who rules them. When this war is over the Ukrainian rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer as it has been in the US for the last 40 years or so.
The idea that life for Ukrainians under Russian hegemony will be worse than life under a EU/US hegemony is false.
The Ukrainian regimes of the last 15 years decided to turn the country into one the sticks it to Russia on behalf of the US. They basically sacrificed their countrymen's wellbeing to service the geopolitical goals of the US and now Ukrainians are suffering dearly for it.
I can't be repeating myself on the Russian/Ukraine war ad infinitum.
This war is not being sustained for the benefit of ordinary Ukrainians. This war will end, and that end will involve negotiations, whether this year or in 10 years time. The main sufferers here are the Ukrainians, not their political leaders who have stashed enough abroad to live comfortable lives no matter the outcome of the war, and the US can bribe them even further to prolong the war as much as is possible, much as they bribed Saddam Hussein to prosecute the war against Iraq for 8 years.
Whatever the Western powers are doing in Ukraine, is it not for the benefit of the ordinary Ukrainian, just the bankers and the industrialists.
Total nonsense. When this war is over, the Ukrainian people will have survived by avoiding Russian fascist purges as we saw in Bucha and other deoccuipied places. That's why Ukrainians are fighting back so fiercely, against all odds, and ready to suffer all hardship. It's about survival and no more no less.
> Life for the masses of the people is generally the same no matter who rules them.
Dead wrong. Countries that the Soviet Union occupied in WW2 are a great example of that. They were near or at parity with Western Europe in 1930s, but after 50 years of Soviet occupation, they barely exceeded pre-occupation levels in main economic metrics by the late 1980s. After the Soviet Union collapsed, countries like Lithuania have seen their GDP per capita increase by 10x, approaching Western European levels that they had before. The Russian rule was a sickness that held them back, robbing several generations of economic development and prosperity. I'd rather die in a trench than experience the same Russian-imposed despair, hopelessness and utter poverty what my parents went through.
"Dear Linux fairly. As I said for a year I have nuclear weapons that I want to trow over Europe but their CPU's were designed for Mandrake and we lost the installation disc. It will not run the newest redhat anymore. Sourceforgevik couldn't helped with our technology dependences and I'm very sad for this.
Please include support in the kernel for fixing my hardware problems so I can bomb Finland and Swedden, Thanks.
XOXO, Vlad"
What they mean with "good try man, but that would be extremely stupid?" This is soo unfair!! Grenada!! Panama!!
> You can trace the genealogy of almost everyone an everything to something evil if you go back far enough.
When watching "Finding Your Roots" and other genealogy shows I always think when the interviewer asks the person how they feel about the misdeeds of an ancestor: We are all descended from rapists, murderers, and cannibals.
And as you imply, we've all done bad in our past. That's part of the experience of learning. It's what we do now that matters. A moment of silence for everyone's first pet.
You're right. The US has murdered far more innocents and invaded many more countries in the last 50 years than Russia has in its long existence. Introspection is sorely lacking around here.
The guy looks Polish by name. They (the Polish) are now "very good friends" of Ukranians except when the Ukranians are also gypsies and they hate Russia.
There are a lot of 3 letter agencies submitting patches to the linux kernel ( for ex. NSA).
Do they feel "comfortable" accepting patches from those organizations ?
So there was nothing wrong when Raiser killed his wife to keep his FS in kernel, right? Everybody felt comfortable? But now when "Reds" involved, it's different!
This is not about overthrowing anything. Is about damage control.
Maybe is safer for Linux to refuse to enter in this viper pit of sanctions and politics until waters calm down a little. Specially in the same day that a team of covered Russian agents were caught in Poland planning several boycotts in NATO territory. The mistrust is not totally unreasonable at this moment.
If I understand correctly, the Russian company proposed including a patch for their own hardware, so the Kernel can manage it. Are the CPUs created by this company banned so important for everybody to grant to be supported by the Linux team? Defying the international sanctions against the company could harm the image of the kernel project. What will be this CPUs used for? To help Russians evade the sanctions and keep the war longer? To save lives? To put it in a missile so they kill children faster?
If it's about real sanctions, they should say so. They don't even have to be that specific.
Because right now it looks like a Polish/EE guy using geopolitical events as an excuse to bully his national enemies on the internet. It's a politically-correct "f__k off and never come back". Totally unprofessional.
It doesn't even say "never come back", it says for the time being don't contribute, because of the organization you belong to, not because of who you are personally.
And Jakub is saying that "we don't feel comfortable". Discomfort can be for multiple reasons, not all of which may be known to the person (or given the "we", possibly people) feeling uncomfortable.
Asserting boundaries is rarely bullying. And I personally don't think this message, in the context we have here, rises past the level of asserting boundaries to bullying. Maintaining boundaries is a good thing that everyone has to learn to do, and have the fortitude to do. It's not easy.
A professional reply would start like: "Thank you for your contributions. Unfortunately, due to uncertainty surrounding sanctions associated with your organization, we cannot accept your patches (...)".
This is not that.
The key is that the onus is clearly on the sanctions themselves, not the uncomfortable feelings of a mysterious "we".
Because sociopaths are without expressive feeling, not professionals? If you've somehow learned, or have been taught, that professionalism means not emoting then you've been taught wrong IMO. Moderation in all things, including lack of emotion.
"I don't feel comfortable leaving pertinent information out of our regulatory filing, even if it's technically not against the law to do so."
Letting another person you are working with know that you are uncomfortable is the polite way to enforce personal boundaries in a professional, or personal, setting.
> If I understand correctly, the Russian company proposed including a patch for their own hardware
Not really. They proposed patches for network drivers for ethernet IP-core which was licensed from Synopsis, California. Most likely as a part of P5600 MIPS IP from Imagination.
This IP core is not specific for Baikal SoCs and used in many products.
It's not that simple. A single person is not required to agree with what their country is doing, and probably can do little. Unless something can be attached to their name, like a tweet saying "all ukrainians shall die" or spreading modern russian ideology, it's wrong to punish. It's prejudice, it's discrimination, no different than not letting somebody into a restaurant just because of their race. Were all germans guilty because of Hitler?
Sorry, but I can't believe you've just compared discrimination against someone going into a restaurant due to their race to Hitler/the Holocaust. Like, c'mon.
What's that rule that every argument on the Internet eventually devolves into something about the Holocaust or Hitler or something like that?
If a German, during WW2, or heck even WW1, submitted an article to a British journal on improvements to industrial equipment, and did so on BASF letterhead and with a correspondence address to BASF's headquarters, companies in the allied nations would be right to think twice before implementing those improvements, or even making comments on those improvements.
> code and science should be separated from politics
I think almost no one agrees that it should be completely separate; there should be some distance, yes, but all these things do exist in the same reality and that can't always just be ignored. Should Linux also accept North-Korean patches for their ICBMs in mainline? Probably not. They can't prevent Linux from being used in them, but they also have no obligation to go our of their way to review, merge, and maintain the code for it.
There is a lot of grey area and you can argue about the specifics of various situations for ages, but there clearly is a point where politics and the intended purpose of patches do matter.
> Should Linux also accept North-Korean patches for their ICBMs in mainline?
While NK is probably not looking to merge their `char/icbm` driver to the mainline tree, what about the NK military fixing a nasty bug in the memory allocator? Should the patch be rejected even if it improves a non-military subsystem, just because of who wrote it?
It's just food-for-thought, personally I do not care one way or the other. As you say, it's all a grey area, and there is not a clear answer, which is where politics and posturing, rather than pragmatism, thrives.
Ignoring trust issues (NK inserting a backdoor), I'd say clean bugfixes should probably be accepted.
My main point was to nuance the absolutist "code and science should be separate". I don't know enough about this code to make a judgement one way or the other: as I understand the commit message it's a cleanup as a prelude to GMAC and X-GMAC SoC support. Maybe the code is badly in need of some cleanup, or maybe it's essentially just fine and there is no reason to merge any of this beyond supporting those SoCs.
For another option, is it possible that patching a legitimate bug could open up a line of attack in an otherwise unrelated piece of code that the bug was somehow blocking? If it is, even legitimate, verified bug fixes, or even bug reports, from non-trusted sources, should be carefully vetted.
They did end up banning all of the University of Minnesota over trust issues. Everything should be carefully vetted, sure, but it's always possible something gets missed; a good backdoor is indistinguishable from a bug, and those definitely end up getting merged. Any merge is a "risk", so to speak. It's a matter of risk management: a patch from Greg Kroah-Hartman is very unlikely to contain an intentional backdoor and a patch from Kim Jong-un is more likely to contain one, and with lots of shades in-between those two extremes.
Worse, you can be quite sure that a patch or series of patches from "Kim Jong-un" will introduce a bug (or rather a well hidden corner case) leading to a backdoor. It can be assumed that there's a hidden incentive behind the patches.
All I'm hearing is NATO military good guys, everyone else evil.
Somehow I should be agreeable to US weapons teams mainlining patches say for whatever weapon killed that random.man and his children during the fall of Kabul. But not a nasty North Koreans?
If that's all you're hearing you are so overly emotionally invested that it's blinding you to context.
No one is saying that citizens and corporations of non-aligned countries shouldn't submit patches which are accepted by the maintainers. They're saying that citizens and corporations of countries which are engaged in hot, cold, or proxy wars with the countries of citizenship of the maintainers shouldn't have patches accepted by said maintainers.
This is silly cutting off your nose to spite your face.
And for your users too.
It's very rich to claim I'm too emotionally invested (because I'm rationally assessing the situation??) in the topic then go one about the emotional investment (comfort) of the maintainer to justify their view...
From what I read in the thread you were the one bringing up NATO intelligence and military patch submissions. And you did it in a context of saying that from what you gather even people from non-aligned countries would be banned from submitting to the Linux kernel, too.
Perhaps other people in this thread also think it's problematic that any military or intelligence agency submits patches. But that wasn't what the post is about. It's about a Russian military-associated company. And that's what most of the comments I read were commenting about.
If you want to channel the conversation to your hobbyhorse you can, and did. But that doesn't mean the people who respond negatively to your comments don't agree in general with you. It seems to me that national militaries should be maintaining their own kernels. And just for precautionary purposes intelligence agencies/companies (whether national or private sector) should be generally banned from kernel submits. Bug reports and exploit reports are another thing, but they are too motivated to insert backdoors and exploits due to the nature of their business.
The context seem to be missing - is it just this specific maintainer's opinion or a result of consensus? Is this specific maintainer in position to make this decision on behalf of the team?
It's worth to add that Baikal Electronics is sanctioned by USA, EU, UK and banned to use ARM. So "feeling uncomfortable accepting the patch" is a nice euphemism in that case.
Well it's indeed one of major SoC suppliers for Russian military, but actually Baikal SoC are used for various civil purposes too: thin clients, servers, network routers, industrial automation/SCADA, CNC and so on.
These are subpar processors for the cost, they are only used when the certification requirements of the govt are in place. Ministry of defence subcontractors hardly count as civilian users.
I would suggest that when the fundamental difference is whether you materially support atrocities and war crimes or not then there should be no possible venue for civil and professional interaction.
Essentially all humans materially support atrocities and war crimes, and historically this has always been true. That certainly includes everyone paying taxes in any major country.
We have little choice about that, but we could also materially support efforts to end armed conflict.
> Baikal processors are made specifically for russian military and have no civilian use
These are general purpose processors and there are plans to deploy them widely across Russian civil service and major state owned banks.
They are indeed sub-par compared to Intel or ARM however in the present situation Russia is faced with a choice between importing electronics through grey channels and developing its own national product even if it is subpar to what would have been normally available.
I personally very much hope the 2nd choice is taken, domestically designed processors take hold and the world gets a new choice of hardware to use.
Suppose it's not everybody's cup of tea, but there are users on this planet who would love to be running a fully free and open source software on machines that provably have no Intel Management Engine or other comparable closed-source technologies.
What the community could be doing instead of refusing useful patches enhancing support for an IP-core licensed from a western company is working with Baikal developers to ensure that desktops/laptops built on their hardware include no closed source software blobs anywhere in the drivers or in EEPROM.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 143 ms ] threadThey were already sanctioned by the Obama admin because they were "associated with military procurement activities, including the development of computer systems for military end-users and the production of computers for nuclear research". That was rescinded a year later. Now it's back for reasons that should be obvious.
You can ignore what's going on in the world and say that open source is completely detached from that, or you can say you're not comfterable going out of your way to include support for Russian processors for Russian arms. Clearly there is some point at which you can't ignore politics: few people would claim IBM did nothing wrong selling the Nazi regime equipment.
Didn't IBM the current owner of Redhat supply equipment to the Nazis which was used to document and track Jews?
By the way who are the "We" in "We don't feel comfortable accepting patches from or relating to hardware produced by your organization."?
I explicitly mentioned IBM's involvement in the holocaust. But that's a historical event; not an on-going one. You can trace the genealogy of almost everyone an everything to something evil if you go back far enough.
I think comparing the Russian and US military is a false equivalence. Do I think the US is innocent? No. But it's just not on the same order.
Of course. The US killings look almost "human" (Serbia, Irak, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Corea etc). And having other country's people killed just to follow US interest shows a lot of empathy. /s
Iraq was ruled by a genocidal dictator.
Does that mean those wars were a good idea? By my estimation, probably not, for a number of reasons. But they're not they're same thing at all as Russia's invasion of Ukraine. It's borderline bad-faith to even compare it.
I don't which other two you're referring to, but I'm willing to bet they're not the same thing at all either.
Anyways, I'm not going to play the "let's take turns justifying the illegal invasions of distant sovereign countries" game.
You can dismiss it as a "game", but the reasons and specifics of the situation DO matter. A lot. Denying this means, for example, that the Nazi invasion of Poland is just the same as the allied invasion of Nazi Germany. After all, both are foreign invasions in a sovereign country. No reasonable person would agree these situations are the same; the invasion in to Nazi territory was horrible because all war is, but was, in the end, a good thing. The same cannot be said about the invasion of Poland.
Arguing that Washington technically didn't invade any of these countries because there were already internal tensions is laughably stupid (what has been happening in Donbass since 2014?). Kindly knock it off.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2018/03/21/595497429/...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/tons-uranium-mis...
From an atheist perspective, the US looks exactly like being ruled by "religio-fascist nutjobs"
If you're going to quibble, the US never sent any forces to Libya. France and the UK provided aerial support to a no-fly zone imposed by a UN resolution, with the US providing some naval support as well. So why does that qualify as an "invasion"?
(Actually, if you really want to quibble, Russia has invaded Ukraine twice in the past decade--the Russian invasion of Crimea/Donbass in 2014 should probably be counted as distinct from the invasion effort starting in 2022, given that they provided very different levels of support and had very different material war aims.)
Which is more plausible when the target of your invasion shares a land border with you.
Seriously?
Setting aside those that the US was directly involved in such as Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, how about the war between and Iraq and Iran that the US urged Saddam Hussein on which resulted in about 500,000 dead, for starters? In those days Saddam was the bestie of the US so long as he stuck it to Iran.
How about the sanctions on medical supplies to Iraq which resulted in about 500,000 deaths of Iraqi children?
Have you forgotten about the invasion of Grenada and Panama that the US invaded to install governments after their own heart? Very much like Russia's invasion of Ukraine only those wars were very much shorter because of the overwhelming might of the US.
Sadly the war on Ukraine is lasting much longer because Ukraine has the support of the US, until the US decides that China warrants more attention.
... Sadly? I guess the Ukrainians should just bow over and welcome their new Russian overlords? Or what are you suggesting here?
I'm not going to comment on every single example, but in many there is significantly more nuance to most of them as I've explained in some other comments already. Does that mean it's "good"? Not necessarily, but it does mean it's just not the same as a completely unwarranted baseless invasion. The specifics of the situation DO matter and you can't just tally military interventions like that.
Life for the masses of the people is generally the same no matter who rules them. When this war is over the Ukrainian rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer as it has been in the US for the last 40 years or so.
The idea that life for Ukrainians under Russian hegemony will be worse than life under a EU/US hegemony is false.
The Ukrainian regimes of the last 15 years decided to turn the country into one the sticks it to Russia on behalf of the US. They basically sacrificed their countrymen's wellbeing to service the geopolitical goals of the US and now Ukrainians are suffering dearly for it.
Read this - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35180460
I can't be repeating myself on the Russian/Ukraine war ad infinitum.
This war is not being sustained for the benefit of ordinary Ukrainians. This war will end, and that end will involve negotiations, whether this year or in 10 years time. The main sufferers here are the Ukrainians, not their political leaders who have stashed enough abroad to live comfortable lives no matter the outcome of the war, and the US can bribe them even further to prolong the war as much as is possible, much as they bribed Saddam Hussein to prosecute the war against Iraq for 8 years.
Whatever the Western powers are doing in Ukraine, is it not for the benefit of the ordinary Ukrainian, just the bankers and the industrialists.
Dead wrong. Countries that the Soviet Union occupied in WW2 are a great example of that. They were near or at parity with Western Europe in 1930s, but after 50 years of Soviet occupation, they barely exceeded pre-occupation levels in main economic metrics by the late 1980s. After the Soviet Union collapsed, countries like Lithuania have seen their GDP per capita increase by 10x, approaching Western European levels that they had before. The Russian rule was a sickness that held them back, robbing several generations of economic development and prosperity. I'd rather die in a trench than experience the same Russian-imposed despair, hopelessness and utter poverty what my parents went through.
I want to stop this thread because they always end up in stupid comparisons.
This is about a fricking code submit.
Please include support in the kernel for fixing my hardware problems so I can bomb Finland and Swedden, Thanks.
XOXO, Vlad"
What they mean with "good try man, but that would be extremely stupid?" This is soo unfair!! Grenada!! Panama!!
When watching "Finding Your Roots" and other genealogy shows I always think when the interviewer asks the person how they feel about the misdeeds of an ancestor: We are all descended from rapists, murderers, and cannibals.
And as you imply, we've all done bad in our past. That's part of the experience of learning. It's what we do now that matters. A moment of silence for everyone's first pet.
It really depends on propaganda. Sadly, you don't get it. IMHO open source shouldn't be a place to decide who's wrong or who's right.
Should we continue to make those same bad decisions now, no.
There are a lot of 3 letter agencies submitting patches to the linux kernel ( for ex. NSA). Do they feel "comfortable" accepting patches from those organizations ?
Maybe is safer for Linux to refuse to enter in this viper pit of sanctions and politics until waters calm down a little. Specially in the same day that a team of covered Russian agents were caught in Poland planning several boycotts in NATO territory. The mistrust is not totally unreasonable at this moment.
If I understand correctly, the Russian company proposed including a patch for their own hardware, so the Kernel can manage it. Are the CPUs created by this company banned so important for everybody to grant to be supported by the Linux team? Defying the international sanctions against the company could harm the image of the kernel project. What will be this CPUs used for? To help Russians evade the sanctions and keep the war longer? To save lives? To put it in a missile so they kill children faster?
Because right now it looks like a Polish/EE guy using geopolitical events as an excuse to bully his national enemies on the internet. It's a politically-correct "f__k off and never come back". Totally unprofessional.
And Jakub is saying that "we don't feel comfortable". Discomfort can be for multiple reasons, not all of which may be known to the person (or given the "we", possibly people) feeling uncomfortable.
Asserting boundaries is rarely bullying. And I personally don't think this message, in the context we have here, rises past the level of asserting boundaries to bullying. Maintaining boundaries is a good thing that everyone has to learn to do, and have the fortitude to do. It's not easy.
This is not that.
The key is that the onus is clearly on the sanctions themselves, not the uncomfortable feelings of a mysterious "we".
"I don't feel comfortable leaving pertinent information out of our regulatory filing, even if it's technically not against the law to do so."
Letting another person you are working with know that you are uncomfortable is the polite way to enforce personal boundaries in a professional, or personal, setting.
Not really. They proposed patches for network drivers for ethernet IP-core which was licensed from Synopsis, California. Most likely as a part of P5600 MIPS IP from Imagination. This IP core is not specific for Baikal SoCs and used in many products.
Is the discomfort based on technical, or legal, or moral/political reasoning?
What's that rule that every argument on the Internet eventually devolves into something about the Holocaust or Hitler or something like that?
If a German, during WW2, or heck even WW1, submitted an article to a British journal on improvements to industrial equipment, and did so on BASF letterhead and with a correspondence address to BASF's headquarters, companies in the allied nations would be right to think twice before implementing those improvements, or even making comments on those improvements.
AFAIK the Linux Foundation is a US non-profit, and many core kernel developers, such as Linus Torvalds and Greg KH reside in the United States.
I think almost no one agrees that it should be completely separate; there should be some distance, yes, but all these things do exist in the same reality and that can't always just be ignored. Should Linux also accept North-Korean patches for their ICBMs in mainline? Probably not. They can't prevent Linux from being used in them, but they also have no obligation to go our of their way to review, merge, and maintain the code for it.
There is a lot of grey area and you can argue about the specifics of various situations for ages, but there clearly is a point where politics and the intended purpose of patches do matter.
While NK is probably not looking to merge their `char/icbm` driver to the mainline tree, what about the NK military fixing a nasty bug in the memory allocator? Should the patch be rejected even if it improves a non-military subsystem, just because of who wrote it?
It's just food-for-thought, personally I do not care one way or the other. As you say, it's all a grey area, and there is not a clear answer, which is where politics and posturing, rather than pragmatism, thrives.
My main point was to nuance the absolutist "code and science should be separate". I don't know enough about this code to make a judgement one way or the other: as I understand the commit message it's a cleanup as a prelude to GMAC and X-GMAC SoC support. Maybe the code is badly in need of some cleanup, or maybe it's essentially just fine and there is no reason to merge any of this beyond supporting those SoCs.
For another option, is it possible that patching a legitimate bug could open up a line of attack in an otherwise unrelated piece of code that the bug was somehow blocking? If it is, even legitimate, verified bug fixes, or even bug reports, from non-trusted sources, should be carefully vetted.
Somehow I should be agreeable to US weapons teams mainlining patches say for whatever weapon killed that random.man and his children during the fall of Kabul. But not a nasty North Koreans?
No one is saying that citizens and corporations of non-aligned countries shouldn't submit patches which are accepted by the maintainers. They're saying that citizens and corporations of countries which are engaged in hot, cold, or proxy wars with the countries of citizenship of the maintainers shouldn't have patches accepted by said maintainers.
And for your users too.
It's very rich to claim I'm too emotionally invested (because I'm rationally assessing the situation??) in the topic then go one about the emotional investment (comfort) of the maintainer to justify their view...
That's classic projection.
This is not rational. It's an emotional interpretation of what was written.
But definitely Russian, North Koreans and Iranians shouldn't.
It's like I'm stuck in a Top Gun movie...
Perhaps other people in this thread also think it's problematic that any military or intelligence agency submits patches. But that wasn't what the post is about. It's about a Russian military-associated company. And that's what most of the comments I read were commenting about.
If you want to channel the conversation to your hobbyhorse you can, and did. But that doesn't mean the people who respond negatively to your comments don't agree in general with you. It seems to me that national militaries should be maintaining their own kernels. And just for precautionary purposes intelligence agencies/companies (whether national or private sector) should be generally banned from kernel submits. Bug reports and exploit reports are another thing, but they are too motivated to insert backdoors and exploits due to the nature of their business.
Intel, Apple, etc are refusing to suppy to RU. Subpar but available parts started making sense.
Linux support enables civilian use exactly; military users likely depend on the mainstream kernel a lot less.
Sanctions created an opportunity and developers are desperate to grasp it.
We have little choice about that, but we could also materially support efforts to end armed conflict.
... if we wanted to ...
These are general purpose processors and there are plans to deploy them widely across Russian civil service and major state owned banks.
They are indeed sub-par compared to Intel or ARM however in the present situation Russia is faced with a choice between importing electronics through grey channels and developing its own national product even if it is subpar to what would have been normally available.
I personally very much hope the 2nd choice is taken, domestically designed processors take hold and the world gets a new choice of hardware to use.
What the community could be doing instead of refusing useful patches enhancing support for an IP-core licensed from a western company is working with Baikal developers to ensure that desktops/laptops built on their hardware include no closed source software blobs anywhere in the drivers or in EEPROM.
How often do we have an opportunity like this?
Because the patch was actually published already fully (in the mail list), if I understand it correctly.
http://techrights.org/2022/10/27/red-hat-lockheed-martin-ray...