gemini://gemini.tuxmachines.org/n/2023/03/25/Free_software_during

Just over 27 years ago, John Perry Barlow's declaration of the independence of Cyberspace claimed that governments "have no sovereignty" over the networked world. In 2023, we have ample reason to know better than that, but we still expect the free-software community to be left alone by the affairs of governments much of the time. A couple of recent episodes related to the war in Ukraine are making it clear that there are limits to our independence.

The free-software community has, indeed, proved resilient to many events in the wider world. The dotcom bust mostly brought an end to the silliness and accelerated our work toward useful goals. The September 11 attacks (and the horrors that followed) had little direct effect on the community; the same is true of the 2008 economic crisis. The pandemic closed down much of the world, but seemingly sped up free-software development. Even the war in Ukraine and the upheavals around it have, apparently, barely touched our community. All of these events had (and are still having) horrific consequences for many of the people involved, but the development community as a whole was often able to carry on as if many of the world's troubles were taking place in another universe.

Recently, though, our community has been lightly touched in a couple of ways. The ipmitool repository at GitHub was locked, and its maintainer denied access, as a result of his status as an employee of the sanctioned Russian firm Yadro. And, in the kernel community, a developer with the Russian firm Baikal Electronics was told by a networking maintainer that "We don't feel comfortable accepting patches from or relating to hardware produced by your organization". The specific reasons for this discomfort were not spelled out, and no policy for the kernel project as a whole has been expressed, but one possible motivation, as described by Konstantin Ryabitsev...

Free software during wartime