10 ms·

Linux maintainer rejects patches from sanctioned Russian Baikal Electronics

83 points by AvImd 4y ago

zoobab 4y ago
Redhat is also providing FLOSS to weapons manufacturers (Raytheon and Lockheed Martin): http://techrights.org/2022/10/27/red-hat-lockheed-martin-raytheon/ http://techrights.org/2022/10/27/red-hat-lockheed-martin-ray...
pphysch 4y ago
[flagged]
- johnisgood 4y ago
  Yeah. I do not get the "comfortable" part either. What does it have to do with Linux? Look at the code itself. sighs
- arp242 4y ago
  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 That was rescinded a year later.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.
  - vfclists 4y ago
    Don't any of the major US companies involved with Linux have huge contracts with the DoD? 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."?
    - arp242 4y ago
      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.
      - zaktoo2 4y ago
        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.
      - hulitu 4y ago
        > 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
        arp242 4y ago
        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.
      - pphysch 4y ago
        Russia has invaded 2 sovereign countries since 2000; USA has invaded at least 4. That's roughly the same order.
  - crypt47 4y ago
    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!
- pvaldes 4y ago
  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?
  - pphysch 4y ago
    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.
    - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
      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.
      - pphysch 4y ago
        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".
- SergeAx 4y ago
  No single effort will overthrow Putin, but a combination of many efforts will.
balozi 4y ago
> We don't feel comfortable accepting patches from or relating to hardware produced by your organization. Is the discomfort based on technical, or legal, or moral/political reasoning?
- pwdisswordfishc 4y ago
  Yes.
  - pajko 4y ago
    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?
    - yladiz 4y ago
      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?
    - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
      > Were all germans guilty because of Hitler? 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.
- junon 4y ago
  The company in question seems only to manufacture for the Russian Armed Forces, not for any civilian products.
Proven 4y ago
[dead]
sph 4y ago
While I agree that code and science should be separated from politics, isn't this the point of the sanction? 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.
- arp242 4y ago
  > 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.
  - sph 4y ago
    > 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.
    - arp242 4y ago
      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.
psychphysic 4y ago
[flagged]
thriftwy 4y ago
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?
klntsky 4y ago
In case you didn't know that, Baikal processors are made specifically for russian military and have no civilian use.
- kmac_ 4y ago
  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.
  - arp9000 4y ago
    [dead]
- iavael 4y ago
  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.
  - klntsky 4y ago
    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.
    - 42cheeries 4y ago
      > These are subpar processors for the cost 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.
thrownawaydad 4y ago
[flagged]
- nucleogenesis 4y ago
  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.
  - thrownawaydad 4y ago
    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.
    - hulitu 4y ago
      > but we could also materially support efforts to end armed conflict. ... if we wanted to ...
      - thrownawaydad 4y ago
        "It doesn't have to be like this // All we need to do is make sure we keep talking" (that's Pink Floyd)
42cheeries 4y ago
> 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.
42cheeries 4y ago
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. How often do we have an opportunity like this?
zx8080 4y ago
Does the copyright work in this case? Because the patch was actually published already fully (in the mail list), if I understand it correctly.
Chabbb 4y ago
A lot of opinions, but it's 200% true - LINUX IS NOT FREE. IT'S CONTROLLED BY US GOVERNMENT.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

83 points by AvImd 4y ago

Redhat is also providing FLOSS to weapons manufacturers (Raytheon and Lockheed Martin): http://techrights.org/2022/10/27/red-hat-lockheed-martin-raytheon/ http://techrights.org/2022/10/27/red-hat-lockheed-martin-ray...

pphysch 4y ago

[flagged]

johnisgood 4y ago
Yeah. I do not get the "comfortable" part either. What does it have to do with Linux? Look at the code itself. sighs
arp242 4y ago
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.
- vfclists 4y ago
  Don't any of the major US companies involved with Linux have huge contracts with the DoD? 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."?
  - arp242 4y ago
    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.
    - zaktoo2 4y ago
      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.
    - hulitu 4y ago
      > 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
      - arp242 4y ago
        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.
    - pphysch 4y ago
      Russia has invaded 2 sovereign countries since 2000; USA has invaded at least 4. That's roughly the same order.
- crypt47 4y ago
  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!
pvaldes 4y ago
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?
- pphysch 4y ago
  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.
  - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
    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.
    - pphysch 4y ago
      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".
SergeAx 4y ago
No single effort will overthrow Putin, but a combination of many efforts will.

balozi 4y ago

> We don't feel comfortable accepting patches from or relating to hardware produced by your organization. Is the discomfort based on technical, or legal, or moral/political reasoning?

pwdisswordfishc 4y ago
Yes.
- pajko 4y ago
  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?
  - yladiz 4y ago
    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?
  - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
    > Were all germans guilty because of Hitler? 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.
junon 4y ago
The company in question seems only to manufacture for the Russian Armed Forces, not for any civilian products.

Proven 4y ago

[dead]

sph 4y ago

While I agree that code and science should be separated from politics, isn't this the point of the sanction? 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.

arp242 4y ago
> 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.
- sph 4y ago
  > 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.
  - arp242 4y ago
    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.

psychphysic 4y ago

[flagged]

thriftwy 4y ago

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?

klntsky 4y ago

In case you didn't know that, Baikal processors are made specifically for russian military and have no civilian use.

kmac_ 4y ago
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.
- arp9000 4y ago
  [dead]
iavael 4y ago
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.
- klntsky 4y ago
  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.
  - 42cheeries 4y ago
    > These are subpar processors for the cost 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.

thrownawaydad 4y ago

[flagged]

nucleogenesis 4y ago
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.
- thrownawaydad 4y ago
  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.
  - hulitu 4y ago
    > but we could also materially support efforts to end armed conflict. ... if we wanted to ...
    - thrownawaydad 4y ago
      "It doesn't have to be like this // All we need to do is make sure we keep talking" (that's Pink Floyd)

42cheeries 4y ago

> 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.

42cheeries 4y ago

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. How often do we have an opportunity like this?

zx8080 4y ago

Does the copyright work in this case? Because the patch was actually published already fully (in the mail list), if I understand it correctly.

Chabbb 4y ago

A lot of opinions, but it's 200% true - LINUX IS NOT FREE. IT'S CONTROLLED BY US GOVERNMENT.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]