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Posted Oct 24, 2024 12:28 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341)
In reply to: Related links by pizza
Parent article: Several Russian developers lose kernel maintainership status

Well, yes, EU or US sanctions lists are a legal barrier to EU or US entities. And RU sanctions lists a barrier for RU entities. Etc.

There is a moral justification in that post though. Which is that it is morally wrong to work for any entity involved in military-industrial complexes that are involved in war-crimes, and that anyone in such a position should be held personally accountable:

"If they work for companies that develop weaponry or logistics used by the $COUNTRY military, they are complicit in $COUNTRY war crimes, and
I hold them responsible at a very personal level".

Now, if we apply that standard generally, it would seem to me that quite a number of contributors who are based in the west - particularly in the USA, UK and DE - are also personally complicit for aiding military-industrial complexes that are profiting from an ongoing, western-backed genocide. Employees of Meta, RedHat, and probably a large number of others (which F/OSS companies are supporting, say, Rheinmetal in Germany, or Elbit in the UK?) should face some kind of censure by our F/OSS communities - up to and including exclusion.

I happen to actually be very very open to that argument. I do think we are each personally responsible, to at least some degree, for our choice in employment and the relations our employer keeps and hence the actions of related parties that one's employment might be supporting (in whatever small way). On the other hand, this is a standard that a) would affect many many contributors, and b) is sadly very difficult to escape, given the sad state of the world and the wide acceptance of war-crimes and crimes against humanity by every great power (and the smaller countries in their orbits) - at least when it comes to their own crimes.

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Posted Oct 24, 2024 12:34 UTC (Thu) by dgn (guest, #132630) [Link] (8 responses)

> Now, if we apply that standard generally, it would seem to me that quite a number of contributors who are based in the west - particularly in the USA, UK and DE - are also personally complicit for aiding military-industrial complexes that are profiting from an ongoing, western-backed genocide. Employees of Meta, RedHat, and probably a large number of others (which F/OSS companies are supporting, say, Rheinmetal in Germany, or Elbit in the UK?) should face some kind of censure by our F/OSS communities - up to and including exclusion.

You do realize that working for a tech company that does less than a single-digit percentage of their revenue dealing with the military-industrial complex is not comparable to a company actually producing weapons as part of that industry, do you? Apart from the fact that the genocide you mention is not even carried out by the US but an ally, so there's another level of indirection.

> I happen to actually be very very open to that argument.
I'm sure you are and have been for a long time, and I'm certain nobody cares.

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Posted Oct 24, 2024 12:48 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (7 responses)

Would the DoD, or Lockheed-Martin, equivalent Russian ministries and M-I companies, etc., be able to operate efficiently (if operate properly at all) if everyone in F/OSS refused to give any support to them in their IT operations?

They probably could still operate, but they would also probably suffer from not-entirely-trivial inefficiencies which they do not have today.

There's no point getting into weeds on arguments about whether there is a genocide ongoing at moment.

There very obviously is to everyone in the world, bar a very small set of people. The ICJ - the authoritative body - already ruled, quite a while ago, that the threshold for action (i.e., by it on proceeding with the case, and also on states for acting to prevent genocide) on the /possibility/ for genocide had been reached. It is also a fact that the acts which obviously are genocide to all in the world, bar a small set, could not have occurred without the support of the USA - both political, operationally, and materially in terms of _very large_ quantities of bombs (more tonnage of HE than that dropped on a number of major cities in Europe in all of WWII combined), and it is a fact the USA provided that support while in possession of the same knowledge the rest of the world has (and more, given the vast SIGINT and IMINT resources it has). Those are just facts.

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Posted Oct 24, 2024 13:20 UTC (Thu) by dgn (guest, #132630) [Link] (5 responses)

> Would the DoD, or Lockheed-Martin, equivalent Russian ministries and M-I companies, etc., be able to operate efficiently (if operate properly at all) if everyone in F/OSS refused to give any support to them in their IT operations?
>
> They probably could still operate, but they would also probably suffer from not-entirely-trivial inefficiencies which they do not have today.

Those organisations are all big enough to afford their own teams doing that support for them. It would just cost them more than buying the equivalent product. Which in the end might just mean that they would not use FOSS in the first place, as using proprietary solutions might come cheaper.

While I completely agree that the thought of somebody using one's own work to do terrible things is abhorrent, I disagree with the guilty-by-association dogma that so many people have. Working for Meta is absolutely not the same as dropping bombs - I think Meta's business model is responsible for a lot of things that are wrong about the internet today, and that's a problem, not their possible business association with Lockheed-Martin. Even working for Lockheed-Martin is not the same as dropping bombs. Somebody's got to build rockets and bombs, that's sadly the way it is. Instead of judging people for doing that work you should be glad you don't have to do it, like you might have to in some fascist dystopia.

When it comes to the people actually taking decisions to drop bombs on civilians, that's a different matter and here we can talk about personal and moral responsibility. But then the circle shrinks substantially and it becomes very, very hard to identify those people.

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Posted Oct 25, 2024 11:05 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (4 responses)

Just to be clear, cause I didn't explicitly set it out: I am arguing /both/ sides here. Although ultimately, I argue there is great hypocrisy and depravity all around.

1. I see value in holding people responsible for the choices to make, including who they work for and the impact of that work on the world.

2. I see that the world is incredibly shitty place, and (ignoring the issue of dual-use technologies - you may work on something for its positive uses, but you can't control the negative uses) so much work these days is via very large corporates, with many interconnections, that you almost can not avoid working for corporates with connections to pretty shitty other corporates.

No doubt stuff I have worked on has been used for things that a number of people would consider "bad" or even "evil". E.g., I have done contracting to fix issues and improve networking software - many uses - but I did that work for a company in the oil industry, and their aim was to more efficiently find more oil for us to burn. Etc.

3. I see a lot of hypocrisy. Really, we just have different "tribes", each aligned around a few different "great powers". Each of which is guilty of great evil around the world. Each claims moral superiority, and decries the evil of the others. And the circus continues and continues, while the bodies of children pile up. The children I killed are all unfortunate accidents, collateral damage, and ultimately the responsibility of the evil terrorists who forced me to bomb children. The children /you/ killed are proof of your utter depravity.

---
On "Somebody's got to build rockets and bombs, that's sadly the way it is." - well, in a world where the M-I-complex was being deployed for defensive purposes, ok, you can easily justify that morally. In a world where, for many decades now, the output of that complex is primarily used by the richest and most developed nations in the world to kill poor people in underdeveloped countries in vast numbers, for the ultimate aim of gaining control (directly or less directly by installing a more sympathetic gov) of their resources, such work is... a lot more questionable. The western "rules based order" has completely lost its moral compass since WWII, in my opinion, your opinion may differ.

The reference to Meta was not about an association to Lockheed-Martin. There are credible allegations that Meta has been providing meta-data from WhatsApp to the IDF, which the IDF then uses for targeting.

But... not really for LWN. Ping me and meet me in Dublin for a pint, for anyone who wants to debate this further.

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Posted Oct 25, 2024 11:42 UTC (Fri) by malmedal (subscriber, #56172) [Link] (3 responses)

> Really, we just have different "tribes", each aligned around a few different "great powers". Each of which is guilty of great evil around the world.

Can you stop writing slanderous and inflammatory statements on LWN? Ukraine vs Russia is clear good vs evil. And stop muddying the issue with unrelated conflicts.

Current Russian discourse is actually clearer than what the Nazis wrote in their papers. (We read some of it in German class)

https://x.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/1657177465658257409

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Posted Oct 25, 2024 12:19 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (2 responses)

None of my points are about Russia and Ukraine in any specific way. My points are actually focused much more on the West. Further, to the extent I have made a point that refers to Russia, it would be where I stated *all* the great powers are involved in great evil around the world. You have even quoted that line.

You appear to be completely misreading my comments. You appear to be responding to some other argument in your head that you've had with other people somewhere, which you are projecting onto my comments, for whatever reading.

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Posted Oct 25, 2024 13:33 UTC (Fri) by malmedal (subscriber, #56172) [Link] (1 responses)

> None of my points are about Russia and Ukraine

Indeed, they are not relevant to the issue at hand or to LWN.

> I stated *all* the great powers are involved in great evil around the world.

An untrue and extremely inflammatory statement. It reads like the powers are morally equal and doing the same things. This is not true. Russia is trying to create chaos. The US is trying to calm things down. China is mostly but unfortunately not completely with calming things down.

> You appear to be completely misreading my comments.

Your comments imply that you are completely ignorant of the rules of war and what belligerents can and cannot do. You really should educate yourself and discuss it in a relevant forum instead of here.

Let's stop this here

Posted Oct 25, 2024 13:39 UTC (Fri) by jake (editor, #205) [Link]

This whole sub-thread (not just the comment I am replying to here) has drifted far from the topic at hand. Please stop it here.

thanks,

jake

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Posted Oct 24, 2024 17:32 UTC (Thu) by malmedal (subscriber, #56172) [Link]

You're ignoring what the article is about: Are there any of these developers that should not have been on the list?

Also your "facts" are not factual:

> The ICJ - the authoritative body - already ruled, quite a while ago, that the threshold for action (i.e., by it on proceeding with the case, and also on states for acting to prevent genocide) on the /possibility/ for genocide had been reached.

No, that is not what they said.

From: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3g9g63jl17o

> The judges had stressed they did not need to say for now whether a genocide had occurred but concluded that some of the acts South Africa complained about, if they were proven, could fall under the United Nations’ Convention on Genocide.

Regarding Russia, the ICJ has already ruled:

From: https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/...

> The Russian Federation shall immediately suspend the military operations that it commenced on 24 February 2022 in the territory of Ukraine

Also, ICC(different court) has an arrest warrant out for Putin:

https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/situation-ukraine-icc-judges...

But again, the issue at hand are the excluded developers, which of them, if any, should not have been excluded?

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Posted Oct 24, 2024 12:55 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

> On the other hand, this is a standard that a) would affect many many contributors, and b) is sadly very difficult to escape,

Some time ago, I pointed out that I was 99% sure that software I wrote was used to kill people (offensive military robots). I'm also 99% sure it has been used to save innocent lives (bomb disposal robots by same manufacturer). I'm 99% sure it has been used to plan (if not outright commit) any number of crimes Yet the overwhelming majority of its use has been to watch cat videos, read email, and other "normal people" activities.

The software in question? A wifi driver that was part of the mainline linux kernel for more than a decade. But before it got mainlined, the maker of those robots paid my employer to figure out a problem that caused high-bandwidth streaming video dropouts. _Every other user_ of that driver benefited from those reliability improvements.

My point? Any given Linux (or almost any F/OSS) contributor is at most two steps away from being directly affiliated with a military force. This standard is not"very difficult to escape"; it is for all intents pretty much impossible.

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Posted Oct 24, 2024 13:12 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

> This standard is not"very difficult to escape"; it is for all intents pretty much impossible.

Agreed.

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Posted Oct 24, 2024 13:36 UTC (Thu) by malmedal (subscriber, #56172) [Link] (1 responses)

> If they work for companies that develop weaponry or logistics used by the $COUNTRY military, they are complicit in $COUNTRY war crimes

Do you want to live in a just and peaceful world?

If so, you're not helping.

In the case of Israel there is photographic evidence that they stripped Palestinian captives to the underwear.

In the case of Russia there is photographic evidence they stripped Ukrainan captives to the underwear and then shot them.

Treating these as if they are the same is going to lead to more wars and bigger wars.

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Posted Oct 24, 2024 13:43 UTC (Thu) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link]

At this point, we're getting well beyond the original topic. Can we stop here before things go off the rails? Thank you!

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Posted Oct 25, 2024 1:39 UTC (Fri) by Kamilion (subscriber, #42576) [Link] (1 responses)

Ah, yes, so because I worked at a Knife Company, I'm ethically responsible for every bladed murder suicide on the planet.
Because I owned a whetstone, I'm culpable for every Hellfire R9X strike.
Due to buying a leather strop, I contributed to the deaths of millions of individuals.

We'll just... conveniently ignore all those other statistics like starvation, right?

Because I wasn't a farmer, I'm ethically responsible for every starving child, right?
Due to not tending a garden, I'm culpable for all the evils of economics and automations and profiteering, right?

Because I owned a screwdriver, someone somewhere was stabbed with an icepick and it's my fault for having a similarly shaped tool, right?

*because I have hands that could strangle someone, I should be imprisoned, or have them removed, right?*

Where does the madness end?

Tools work at the behest of their holder. We do not blame our tools. We blame ourselves.

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Posted Oct 25, 2024 2:14 UTC (Fri) by Kamilion (subscriber, #42576) [Link]

Ah, sorry, just realized that my dripping sarcasm may not have come across properly in text.
Paul, not really directing that at you; just elucidating in general. I also feel like I share some responsibility; like pizza, my contributions to ROS may have harmed, helped, and forced progress. But the question is, how much of that lays on my shoulders? Do my contributions to SLAM *actually* make me culpable for 'new things' heading out to the battlefield?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1QRqu3Cocw

"How Do Military Drones Fly Without GPS? | Ian Laffey, Thesus"

It's very clear to me that what I developed ten years ago is "being independently rediscovered" at a very rapid rate. This "kid" (and I use the term loosely, due to his youth, and verbal tic of 'Like', every three words as the cogs are turning in the background and he needs a moment for text to speech to finish exporting the current symbols before the next queued can be delivered) has pushed forward optical techniques that are older than I am, and mixed them up with modern tools. Those tools are intended for the battlefield, and it's clear he lacks the kind of life experience to apply a moral compass to the results. He likely knows they're going to harm people but has no context in his life to understand what that actually means.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4mc5mHksl8

This sort of scene is absolutely unheard of in american life, and nowhere in childhood or matriculation would he have encountered it.

"You see brief clips of it on the news." Except when you don't because even the news censors things to "buildings falling" and property damage. I can't recall the last time I've seen a *real pool of blood* -- it's something that's "only in fiction".

So yeah.

I don't deny that we can be very disassociated with life today.

Projectile Weapons are no longer seen as hunting tools for food gathering, because the general public now shops at walmart.

People have grown complacent, expecting the results of a process without bothering to look into the meat packing industry themselves.
What they might find there may be surprising. "The children yearn for the mines" is a pertinent meme to review in this case.

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