Why geopolitics risks global open source collaborations
Politics tamfitronics Politics tamfitronics Linux Foundation’s decision to ban Russian maintainers has the potential to destroy open source’s global collaboration modelByCliff Saran,Managing Editor Published: 30 Oct 2024 12:20Following the removal last week of Russian Linux kernel maintainers to comply with US policies, Linus Torvalds – the developer of the original Linux kernel – spoke about his concerns that there were lots of Russian trolls who could potentially infiltrate the Linux kernel. The decision to block the maintainers followed a compromise of the open source XY Utils software library, which was caused by a social engineering attack targeting the maintainer of the utility. “It’s entirely clear why the change was done. It’s not getting reverted, and using multiple random anonymous accounts to try to ‘grass root’ it by Russian troll factories isn’t going to change anything,”...