
On Fri, Oct 25, 2024 at 11:56 AM tusooa via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
Reply is below quoted content.
On Friday, October 25, 2024 11:34:47 A.M. EDT Dhaval Giani via talk wrote:
On Fri, Oct 25, 2024 at 8:33 AM Evan Leibovitch <evan@telly.org> wrote:
Expelled. Removed.
Maybe you missed a key nuance. Russians were not expelled. It was maintainers who are working for sanctioned entities.
I have two observations. First, only one person named (Serge Semin) can be confirmed to be working for "sanctioned entities," while for all other people being removed, the only common thing they have is to be using a .ru email address.
Second, "complying with government orders" does not automatically justify some action as ethical. Government orders can be unethical, for example, if the government requires all end-to-end encryption applications to implement a backdoor for the government. Complying with that order will definitely be a highly unethical action.
When the government requires something A, one should not automatically add A to their moral standards. A good moral standard, in my opinion, should still be non-discriminative. For example, the standard can disallow the action of killing people, but it should not, however, disallow the action of killing people of only some identities, while allowing the action of killing of others, because that would be discriminative (the reality, of course, is much more complicated, this is but a simplified model to illustrate my opinion).
In this way, the Linux Foundation can be doing an unethical thing, and it is understandable. What cannot be justified is doing an unethical thing and still claim that it is being ethical. In this case, what they might not be able to do is to revert the removal, but what they are definitely able to do is to acknowledge that the removal is unethical and discriminative, to condemn the current situation, and call on the public to protest against it.
Best regards, tusooa
The Linux Foundation is a US based entity, and as such, is subjet to all rules and regulations issued by the US government. Entities such as this will receive a list of sanctioned entities that they MUST NOT work with, under penalty of heavy fines. So even if the emails removed do not contain "fsb" or whatever subdomain, the LF will have an internal list that they possibly cannot publish based on orders of the US Gov that includes people with just an .ru email address, and even some with .ca for all I care. This a legal issue, the LF literally has no choice here, Linus just happens to agree with them because of his own reasons. Is it unethical? This is a personal point of view, but as a BUSINESS, they don't get that luxury. -nick