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That's shared source, look it up, it has nothing to do with open source.

What? Almost none of the tech where I live is from the US. Not to mention that Samsung is the biggest contender to Apple in the US and they're more or less 50/50 with market share ATM.

The US is losing the war on world domination, something they were winning the past century or so, and they don't like that. That's basically the only reason any of this is happening. The war is just an excuse. As always, they would rather have Russia and China out of the picture than having to compete with them... because they can't, especially not with China.

Like how my preference is Protonmail being hosted by a neutral country based company

I also use Protonmail because of this. Sure, the free plan is not really great, but I only keep important stuff, so I don't get over the 500MB limit, I delete or archive the rest.

kernel....however any novel encryption does have to be noted to NSA and other organizarions in the USA

That may be true, but only if you're a US citizen. For example, my country doesn't have such regulations. In the end, if it's open source, it shouldn't matter whether I report stuff like that to any organization. It's open source, look it up, it's on a git repo online freely for everyone to review the code.

A foreign state actor wanting to send encrypted communications to overthrow another entity isn't going to follow software laws anyway.

Exactly. As if hacking and DDOSing are legal 😒. It's just throwing money away on some people doing pointless things.

On the other hand, having a ln encryption technologies taskforce makes sense IMO. Watching over what's going on in the open source world regarding cryptography, yeah, that is something that can actually be useful... for the country's cyber-security I mean.

I wasn't saying that Russia is not an ass, I was just saying that the whole point of open source is that it's above borders and nationalities, religion, sexual orientation, etc. It should be an imperative to keep these core values, not bend over backwards when even no warning has been issued, which I'm fairly certain it would have never happened. And on top of that, Linus'es reaction to them being Russian, I mean... come on!

But moving people around to code isn't 🤨? I'm sure it far easier to justify a donation than to book plane tickets and find places for the devs where to stay. And to be perfectly honest, the whole point of open source is "you can contribute from anywhere". The first time I would've encountered the move people around problem, I would have been "this is not the point of open source, it goes against the very spirit of it, we have to do something about this".

US and EU double standards is what this whataboutism is all about. I can state this for a fact, since my country is also in this pickle because of EU double standards. And it is constructive if you have a valid reason to raise the issue. There is a valid reason to raise this issue.

I still don't think something so important should be beholden to the whims of one company (Linux Foundation) or their country's laws (USA).

Exactly my thoughts.

I would strongly prefer to use an operating system that didn't have this problem. Do any even exist?

I was contemplating using FreeBSD, but then I found about the kernel switch to forbid Russian or Chinese usernames and... well, that's not an option as well IMO.

Unfortunately, we would never know.

Here's an idea: don't invade sovereign nations unprovoked.

That is a great idea! Unfortunately, not everyone has a say in that, especially mere mortals... you know, people like devs.

Unfortunately there wasn't really any international authority that could do it

There is, the UN, but they silent, as always... at least regarding the US. We all know why...

Then why in the hell was the LF founded in the US? That is something that clearly needs explaining. For example, Sweden is a much better place to do these sorts of things, their software laws are very liberal.

Some of these things need to be rethought if you ask me, this is not something that should be left like this. If no one in the kernel, including Linus, doesn't see a serious problem with "we have to move people around to code", then most of these people are probably braindead... I'm sorry, but if it was me, once I found out I had to move devs around to code, I would have been "fuck this we're moving the foundation".

The senior maintainers of arguably the most important FOSS project trying to operate secretively on something like this has shattered my trust in them, as well as many others.

Basically, my stand on this.

And that it was dismissed like it was "no big deal" by Linus and some of the other senior maintainers.

But seriously, Linus's comment regarding this was... just... I have no words... he basically put every Russian in the same basket, called them trolls and added a racist comment on top of that, I mean... yeah, I lost all respect for him. At least his previous fits were about code and only if someone fucked up something, this is completely different.