time to move to switzerland ? [LWN.net]

time to move to switzerland ?

Posted Oct 23, 2024 5:39 UTC (Wed) by johnjones (guest, #5462)
Parent article: Several Russian developers lose kernel maintainership status

the riscv project saw this a while back and moved

switzerland still freezes russian bank accounts etc and upholds law they just dont use law as a offensive

frankly if you consider that russian nationals are being targeted as legitimate you ignore the fact that someone who is a avowed "dissident" might be able to contribute and even strengthen our overall understanding and lives...

basically I personally disagree with targeting groups of people and think sanctions against structures and individuals is needed.

people should be able to contribute under their own name rather than lie about where the source code came from.

John Jones

time to move to switzerland ?

Posted Oct 23, 2024 18:56 UTC (Wed) by MarcB (subscriber, #101804) [Link] (2 responses)

Sanctions are exactly like you want them. They are either personal (this will in all likelihood affect no one here) or against specific organizations, including companies.

For the EU, the list is here: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A02014R0269-20240914
Every entry has a justification; each significantly longer then a single sentence.

The only thing that seems really objectionable here is the sentence "They can come
back in the future if sufficient documentation is provided". That is naive (at best). I would not expect anyone of the affected, who is still living in Russia, to do that, even if they are not associated with any sanctioned entity. At the very least, they would be harassed online once they reappear in the list.

Of course, if there was communication beforehand, and the list of affected maintainers was already reduced, then its fine.

time to move to switzerland ?

Posted Oct 24, 2024 0:48 UTC (Thu) by patrakov (subscriber, #97174) [Link]

They will be harassed online and offline no matter what—I still am, by both sides ("traitor!" vs. "accomplice!"), even though I relocated to the Philippines back in March 2022 and closed my Russian business. So, this doesn't look like a valid argument.

The only real consequence of such harassment for me is that I am no longer a freediver, as I can't trust my buddies not to stage an "accident."

time to move to switzerland ?

Posted Oct 24, 2024 9:18 UTC (Thu) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link]

>Sanctions are exactly like you want them. They are either personal (this will in all likelihood affect no one here) or against specific organizations, including companies.

It's the secondary sanctions that get you. It's not "you can't do business with entity X (in Russia)", but "you can't do business with entity Y (in the US/EU/elsewhere in the world) because they're still doing business with entity X (in Russia)". The chain can be arbitrarily deep. It becomes like an oil spill of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.

They only work because the US has quite a lot of influence on international currency flows, which explains the continuing moves to promote alternative systems. Secondary sanctions are known to be fairly ineffective and often self-defeating, but they are still quite popular. In particular they suffer from over-enforcement (like here). Companies using Redhat are afraid they might get sanctioned because they have a relationship with LF which has a relationship with Linus who merges pulls requests from an developer in America who happens to have a Russian email address.