Tinidril

I refuse to call any Billionaires Americans. A billionaire in America has far more in common with a billionaire in Ireland or France than with working class Americans. They don't use our schools, drink our water, drive our roads, or rely on our safety nets. They don't take out the trash, do their laundry, wait 6 months for a doctor's appointment, or stress over defunding their retirement to pay for needed medication.

Billionaire involvement in politics should be considered foreign interference. Of course AIPAC is foreign interference too, but apparently that's not a problem either.

Best I could do without a definition for the stupid use of "leftist extremists" with no definition. My point is, there is zero evidence to blame this election on leftists of any stripe.

You have data to back that up I assume?

Biden had polling in his hands that said Trump would get 400 electoral votes against him on the day he decided to run for a second term. Then he held on just long enough to make certain we would have no primary and be stuck with a candidate who couldn't shake the stink of his presidency.

Harris lost the popular vote by over 4-million votes. There aren't that many "leftist extremists" in the whole damn country, and only a small subset of those wouldn't have voted for Harris.

The vast bulk of those who stayed home were left leaning apolitical normies. Most of the country fits in that group.

Maybe they both die and we get Mike Johnson!

Possession is irrelevant too. Access to source code has not being restricted, and doing so wouldn't even be realistically possible. The only practical change is that new updates from these developers will not be published by the Linux Foundation, and ongoing integration will not be done by mainline Linux developers.

If Russia wants, they can fork Linux at any time, call it Rusinux, and do whatever they want with it. They could even port future Linux updates back to their kernel. They still have to keep it under the GPL2 license, but only if they want to honor Western copyright laws and treaties.

Sure, if words are meaningless.

Who owns the copyright is irrelevant. Russian developers are still entirely entitled to use and modify the Linux source. The only thing they can't do is submit their changes for inclusion in the main Linux development tree. The only real consequence for them is that their changes might be broken by future kernel updates and they will have to fix it themselves to use newer kernels. That, and they will have to maintain their own distribution system. I've also seen nothing to suggest anyone's code is being removed.

The US didn't invade Ukraine and, obviously, isn't under US or European sanctions. I'm sure that you and I could agree on a great deal when it comes to American foreign policy, it's just not relevant to this situation where Russia is the clear aggressor. (Setting aside the usual "buffer zone" bullshit that every aggressor state uses and Putin already abandoned).

You left out "Russian invasion, Russian ethnic cleansing, and Russian war crimes."

So, in your world, the US government is responsible to provide you with a detailed justification for the specific sanctions being applied against a foreign adversary? Keep waiting.

I really don't think you understand what's going on in the Russian economy right now. Russia has unwittingly gotten themselves embroiled in an existential conflict. (Less existential for the country than for the warlords running it.) Every expenditure or resources, natural, human, financial, etc, is being weighed against it's benefits to the war. Even basic things like their ability to feed their population are only valued because the war can't be fought without them. That's what a war economy is.

Despite all the failures of the Russian military, it took well over a year for Putin to fire his top general. The reason it took so long was that Putin trusted his general to remain loyal and not initiate a coup. Removing him was a drastic move, but the more interesting part is who replaced him. The new Russian defense minister got the job with absolutely no military training, background, or experience. His only qualification was that he is an extremely capable economist who is largely credited with helping Russia transition to a war economy and blunt the impact of western sanctions. That should tell you all you need to know about how important Russia thinks economics are to the war.

our work should exist for all mankind and to the betterment of society as a whole

That's nice and all, but totally unrealistic. The vast majority of kernel development is done because the developers (or their sponsors) benefit from the work they do and from having that work integrated with the rest of the kernel. I don't see that as a bad thing.

Ban work on Russian firmware or Linux compatibility with Russian hardware.

There is no such thing as "Russian hardware" when it comes to computing. Russia has it's own standards for a lot of technologies, but creating a proprietary set of computing standards that's disconnected from the ecosystem of western hardware makes no sense. They manufacture some of their own computing hardware, but it's all based on the same standards that are used everywhere else.

I would be absolutely amazed if the Russian government is somehow on the bleeding edge of linux development and actively deploying head branch builds of linux with the latest available firmware.

Why? Anyone contributing to the Linux kernel is, almost by definition, at the "bleeding edge of Linux development". It may not be the bleeding edge pushing the boundaries of computer science, but it doesn't have to be. A whole lot of kernel development is pretty basic stuff aimed to satisfy particular needs or requirements. Drones benefit greatly from highly specialized power management, real time data collection, flexible networking, etc. Most are built from off the shelf hardware and consumer electronics.

their almost certainly backporting to a stable linux release and that means this kinda ban if it follows you’re reason isn’t going to have an impact

The issue of drift exists with both older and newer kernels. If a particular kernel is so stable that drift isn't an issue, then it isn't a kernel that will be adding a bunch of new Russian commits anyways. If they are simply back-porting it themselves, then their inability to commit to the main Linux branches is irrelevant. In the scenario, the whole discussion is moot.

I'm not going to take that hill because the generals haven't proven to me that it's necessary to win the war.

This isn't an isolated thing. It's a small part of the biggest sanctions effort in history. Every single sanction, can be nit-picked in just the same way. There is very little in the way of technology that can't be dual purposed into warfare, and those that can't be are still relevant to the economic pressures being applied.

I have no idea why you are so sure that the development in question isn't already connected to military drones, but it's a really weird assumption. What exactly do you think is the number one priority for Russia right now in the area of technical development? What operating system do you think powers most drones, military or otherwise?

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.