Unfortunately, Russia would not hesitate a second to use these Russian maintainers to include some shady stuff into Linux. Russia used everything they can to their advantage.
Now, we can wait for that to happen and have all sorts of issues when some backdoor gets distributed on a massive scale on a lot of Linux systems, or we can be realistic about the situation and take action before that.
I would not trust anyone from China to work in FOSS either, since they are exactly the same.
by this logic it turns out that the code quality control system is built in such a way that if someone has malicious intent and wants to add malicious code, but is not affiliated with dubious structures, then he will easily succeed? Hey, what about enough eyeballs and shallow bugs?
I do agree that quality control should catch things, but we are all human and we don’t catch a 100%. So if quality control is flooded with too much things to catch, the chance of one slipping by increases.
Also, a lot of FOSS is based on volenteers, do we just ask those people to put in more hours? Who is responsible anyways if something makes it through and actually causes damage to something or someone?
I find the decision quite reasonable. You at least filter out the party most likely to pull something shady. We should still be very careful, but it takes away some the work.
@MrAlternateTape @fireshell <sarcasm>But Stuxnet proves nobody in the United States would do that.</sarcasm>
If only there was some sort of review process for code to get into the kernel…
Yeah better discriminate based on nationality /s. But why stop at that? Poor people are too easily bribed can’t have them. I hear the CIA recruits from top US universities, can’t trust those college grads either. Anyone belonging to some homophobic church or religious group? Better not what if they’re closeted gay and get blackmailed? Anyone in a monogamous relationship should be excluded for the same reason, if you think about it. *tips forehead*
We stop at that point. Because it is very clear and obvious to everybody, that a Russian citizen can be forced to do the governments bidding at any time and Russia has demonstrated that they will do that. The whole country is build on propaganda and fear amongst it’s people.
The rest of the groups you name, are not the same. Sure, a poor person could be bribed. But is that the same as the 100% chance that Russia will use anything they can to fuck with everybody they see as an enemy? I don’t think so.
So your arguments are simply invalid in this case. If Russia was a democracy, a real one, I would say they made the wrong decision by pushing the Russians out. But in the current circumstances? I understand the decision.
If we follow through with it, I would absolutely never ever trust anyone from the US, for example. US is very much known for cyber espionage and shady operations, and could absolutely backdoor Linux.
This is all power play, and it comes from a very certain direction amidst this political struggle.
You want your open source code not to have backdoors? Review it meticulously. This is really the only way, and the one an entire open-source community relies on - pretty successfully, by the way.
The US is in many ways, as bad as Russia concerning privacy. If the Americans want a backdoor, they’ll get it too.
However, not many western countries are currently almost at war with the US, the US so far has been a very good ally to the Western countries. It is not in their interest to bring our hospitals down, or put a stop to our air traffic. They don’t gain much from hurting us. Russia does.
Russia does have an interest in bringing systems down and spying as much as possible. And they have no ethic restrictions at all.
So why should we leave an obvious angle of attack open? Sure, it’s supposedly to be found by code reviews, but why make their job harder?
Do we even have numbers on how many Russians have contributed?
