I propose to make an international fork of the Linux kernel

Linus Torvalds himself was the first to speak and wrote a rather lengthy nonsense. Like we have compliance rules, so fuck everyone in the ru zone, and I’m also Finnish and remember my grandfathers. Quite a strange message, who, what, why, what do grandfathers and Finns have to do with it. So dear Finnish guy Linus Torvalds, what did your grandfather do between 1941-1945, huh?

I'll quote myself

Here we can continue the idea that we all remember Mannerheim and which army blocked Leningrad, in which hundreds of thousands of people (600k residents only) died with direct participation. And his attacks on the Finnish grandfathers, we also have grandfathers and we also remember them and have something to ask.

Therefore, let this Mr. Torvalds be silent here.

Afterwards, more adequate people spoke. In short, the US government by decree prohibited cooperation with Russians in sanctioned companies that are involved in the development of the Linux kernel. And it seems clear. But there is a serious problem, and then what about open source? The sanctions on specific commercial firms and corporations are understandable. And the code from these developers will remain or will occur in a rollback cycle git revert… Why, the code is normal, these are toxic developers, we take away the work, we cancel the developer, we delete the record about them. Well, there was a period when the works of certain people were burned, including not only artistic works, but also scientific ones. But of course this is different. This cannot happen in 2024.

The goal of open source is for the participation of any interested party, regardless of everything. If you want to write code, write it. If you want to help with translation, translate. Prepare the documentation, go ahead. Testing all this shitty code, you're just a hero. What exactly now?

And now Pandora’s box has been opened, open source is not for everyone, or rather for everyone, but not for those who work in companies and these companies have been sanctioned by the US government. These are not only Russians, but everyone else who is not yet under sanctions. It could be any inhabitant of the planet earth, if the US government considers that this particular country is interfering with national security, your powers are in open source, that’s all!

True, if you look at the list of sanctions by country, there are quite a lot of them and it’s interesting why they didn’t guess ru? Iran, China and other programmers from these countries will soon be excommunicated from the holy of holies?

And what exactly next? And then the following events may happen, a ban not only on committing to the Linux kernel, but on using, downloading, open-source programs. Block access to open source in general and free software assemblies.

Therefore, I propose to create an international fork of the Linux kernel, which will not be subject to US sanctions. Participation in development does not depend on place of residence, work in a particular company, native language or nationality, binary or non-binary, vertical or horizontal 🙂 Where any person, depending on their skills, can make a contribution.

And remember how it all began… there were several people in the early 1980s, including Richard Stallman. Which at that time only whispered about what we would reap today. The source code is available to everyone in the world. Anyone can improve, make changes, collect, port to any platform. And the main thing is to use it as he pleases. And every year this idea, only in a whisper, still only under a few keyboards, began to take on its physical form. There were more participants and users every year. At first, corporations perceived open source as a fierce enemy, but recent decades have proven that this type of software development and use not only works, but allows us to make giant strides in the IT industry. Open source is all around us, it's everywhere. Routers, smartphones, PCs, microcontrollers, tablets. It's all open source, we use it every day. The idea from several people and their initial work gave rise to tens of millions of followers who also every day develop new programs, improve old ones, and test them. Translated into hundreds of languages. And this, first of all, the work of millions of people is available to everyone, without exception, until current events. Which may have already discredited the idea itself. But can such a code belong to everyone…

If you compare Open Source with a historical event, how successful and progressive it was. This is the transition from gathering to agriculture, or the flight of the first man into space, Yuri Gagarin.

The flight of the first and only people to the moon and their landing

These are not just the achievements of individual countries or their cooperation, these are the achievements of all humanity. Just like open source programs, the Linux kernel and countless distributions built on it and used in all areas of our lives.

Those achievements, the work of people, the enthusiasm of research. It was not in vain, it allowed us to expand our understanding of space. And as a result, all these developments found their way into society, discoveries, research, now we use the works of those people and the developments of current ones, built on past ones. It's the same with open source software. IT stands on generations of giants, which is still being formed and builds on the previous one. In the end, it's all the work of people. Which they want to ban, delete from memory, from credits files. So that there would not even be a mention left.

The result is regrettable. We are rolling back, technological ties are being broken, a witch hunt begins…