This is absurd. Are you being serious? I’m aware how sanctions are setup in the US because I’m compelled to complete hr training on them every 8 months even though I have no interaction with anyone that would overlap with sanctions requirements. That doesn’t make it any less absurd. It’s also not on me to somehow categorically disprove the link between Linux contributions and military work, the onus there is and as it always should be is on the entity demanding you do something in response to it. But OK, let’s say all the work on Linux coming from anyone who happens to live in or have a Russian nationality somehow goes back to the war effort. Ban work on Russian firmware or Linux compatibility with Russian hardware. Don’t ban Russian people unilaterally and with force using flimsy hypothetical justifications and reductive arguments. I go back to ww1 and the role of scientists in war. They should abstain. Developers should abstains. We don’t belong to the countries we live in, our work should exist for all mankind and to the betterment of society as a whole. If the US wants a trade embargo, or a corporate berlin wall I’m all for it. This is not that.

Edit: Also, not really relevent, but 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. Most of the US government still runs on windows out of sheer apathy. If they are using these contributions in drones 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 until a few releases down the line and that’s easily bypassable by just not upgrading linux. Russian already presumably sanctioned to older hardware (excluding self manufactured) so that isn’t even a hard choice.

I still maintain this is a pretty weak argument. And it does nothing to address the question of what do these devs contribute to instead because it’s not likely their suddenly gonna become jobless and dependent on the state. These are highly skilled and motivated developers just based on what ive heard about getting contributions into the mainline kernel. I just hope they don’t get recruited to write drone targetting systems because we’ve decided to ban them from contributing to a project everyone benefits from.

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.

The reverse is also true. Any dev wanting to contribute to Linux in rust which linus himself allowed (despite his silence on this matter) are just going to have to deal with constant headache trying to maintain compatibility with the C interfaces which the devs keep breaking. Either they should’ve never allowed rust in the kernel or they should force devs to at least act in good faith and collaborate (and any that refuse to, well they should be ousted because they can’t behave responsibly). This entire situation is so toxic and I see that as a failure in leadership. That zfs comment is also a little toxic but I don’t think it’s a direct quote. It also doesn’t seem like a fair comparison because from what I can tell zfs isn’t even part of the kernel code base and due to legal reasons cannot be. While it would be great for the kernel not to break it, it is, for all intents and purposes an external project. This rust debacle is different because it’s rust kernel devs and c kernel devs both operating in the same project and trying to find some kind of alignment. To me it seems like there’s enough of an acknowledgment of the value of memory safety that rust support was considered but there’s no authority figure actually supporting it or defending the devs that were invited to actually contribute in it. What a mess.

This specific talk was about defining shared common interfaces so these different groups could work together and the guy who actually talked him into stepping down essentially said “I’m gonna keep writing C and if that breaks your rust stuff that’s not my problem”. This isn’t about convincing the c devs to write rust it’s about convincing them to work together when some of them seem to have made up their mind to sabotage rust support (either through indifference or willful interface regressions). Personally I’m more ashamed what this points to for someone new wanting to come in contribute to Linux.

Man, despite loving Foss this whole debacle is so disillusioning for anyone that ever wanted to pivot to working on it full time. You don’t have to agree with people wanting to try new things, but the bare minimum is not to spew vitriol to keep them quiet or claim you’ll break their stuff and that’s their problem because they aren’t doing things the same way as you but still depend on a shared ecosystem. All we have to do is be bloody polite to each other and build cool sh*t, why is that so hard. All the best to the Linux rust rewrite for these folks, but to me it just feels like both projects are losing here. Linux losing the passion and drive for adopting more modern stuff and all the folks with that drive opting to restart from scratch because too many people refuse to get along.

Just use vscode. It’s basically the standard text editor for everything nowadays. Eventually you may want to start exploring vim/emacs but no reason to prioritise that now when all you need is something you can write code in that gives you squigglies when you do something wrong.

Is that still being recommended? Last I heard it was eol, no longer getting feature changes or improvements and was basically superceded by vscode.