TLDR;
It literally hurts me personally to see this happening. It’s like a kick in the gut. I used to be proud about having had an involvement with the Linux kernel community in a previous life. This doesn’t feel like the community I remember being part of.
Knee-jerk jingoism, just how the security state likes it.
They’re just working class people trying to get by in a shitty bourgeois democracy, just like us. They have as much say in what the state does as we do, which is almost none.
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.
I don’t really see how that relates. These are open source contributors to Linux, a global os everyone has access to. Their contributions would benefit everyone. If their employed by a Russian company paying them to contribute to Linux then the economic aspect might make sense but I see that as a pretty weak argument. Now those devs are more likely to be poached to work in industries that more directly contribute to the war. This is like ww1 and German scientists who were supposed to be impartial getting recruited into the war machine to create poison gas. We shouldn’t be encouraging that or making it easier.
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 don’t really think the Russian economy is any real bottleneck here; they have abundant natural resources, a densely-knit industry and even now still many trading partners. Ultimately the only realistic way to stop the war is a peace agreement, which is why people voted for Zelenskyy in the first place.
You can 100% choose not to work for a military contractor making weapons you know will be used against civilians by a genocidal government.
