To my complete lack of surprise, Russia
isseems to be a freer country for free software developers than the United States.And this is based on what
The fact that Russia does not remove maintainers for political reasons.
Bro… Russia arrests protesters from the streets for committing the crime of holding up blank sheets of paper… Russia throws people in jail for political reasons all the time. How are those the actions of the free country? I have a trans friend living in Russia right now who is literally unable to speak about being trans online because she might be accused of “spreading lgbtq+ propaganda”.
The funniest story about this is that time AST (Russian book publisher) literally redacted the text of a biography about an openly-gay Italian director called Pier Paolo Pasolini in order to comply with Russian anti-gay “propaganda” laws… and then published it with the redactions clearly visible:
Literally redacted lmao. Does this scream “free country” to you?
This whole discussion exists because the USA aren’t a free country either, or else the US-based Linux Foundation would not have to act like it does, I thought?
It’s a shame they didn’t consider moving the LF foundation to Europe or something. If the choice is kick out contributors to support sanctions or operate without political pressure, the second is far better.
I cannot stand Putin or Russia’s action, but punishing individual contributors just trying to write code and build Linux isn’t helpful.
Unless evidence is found of malicious commits, it is pretty harsh on those caught up with this.
Let’s remember that many Russians will probably be locked up and/or killed for coming out against Putin. Punishing them achieves nothing.
They removed russian maintainers that are associated with sanctioned companies. Individual russian contributers were unaffected by this.
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