by Ivan Lizan
[REGNUM] At the end of October, Russian developers were banned from developing the Linux operating system kernel. Now Russians are cut off from developing the OS, which occupies 5% of the desktop market, 30% of the server market, and is used in a host of other devices - from routers to smartphones and portable gaming consoles.
The news shook the information space, as it became not only a striking example of discrimination based on nationality, but also a precedent when sanctions affect open source software, which until now was considered immune to politically motivated restrictions.
Globally, software is divided into two parts depending on the availability of its source code: closed and open.
Closed, or proprietary, software is subject to restrictions on the use, copying, and modification of the source code. A clear example is the Windows OS: you cannot distribute it as you wish, you do not have access to its source code, and you do not have the right to modify it. Such software is the property of the developer, who sets the rules for use.
Open source software can be freely used and modified. It appeared as a counterweight to proprietary software in the mid-1980s thanks to the American Richard Stallman, who united around himself in the NGO Free Software Foundation developers guided by the idea of ​​creating free software, for the use of which you do not need to pay.
Regardless of the goals that open source developers are guided by, they still enter into legal relations with each other, automatically accepting the terms of the license. Those, in turn, come in several types.
Reciprocal - oblige the developer to distribute the modified program under the same conditions as the original. Such licenses include all types of GPL (General Public License), LGPL and AGPL.
Permissive — allow the creation of proprietary software based on the original program, but do not allow the author of the original code to control the fate of the modified version of the software. Permissive licenses include BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution License), MIT, and Apache.
Thus, open source software, in turn, is divided into two more types depending on the order: license - its use for free (distributed under mutual licenses) and Open Source (distributed under permissive licenses).
In the case of Linux and Russia, the GPL license is important. Now we need to figure out how Open Source developers interact with each other — the movement.
At the core is a repository — a cloud storage with project files containing the source code, which are usually GitLab or Launchpad portals. Contributors, i.e. participants in the Open Source movement, work with these files. They copy the repository for themselves, creating a fork (clone), and make their own changes to it that do not affect the main repository. The edits made to the fork are called commits. After that, contributors submit a pull request to the repository administrators — a request to merge their copy of the repository with its original. If the administration approves the request, the original repository is updated.
In the case of Linux, a large operating system with many variants, worked on by hundreds of different teams, there is an internal division of developers. Over the years, the most competent and responsible members of the community have been promoted to maintainers, allowing them to work with the operating system kernel. And at the head of the entire movement are three people: Linus Torvalds, Greg Kroah-Hartman and Huah Han.
And here, at the intersection of law and the internal hierarchy of Open Source developers, the inevitable bureaucracy arises in the form of the non-profit consortium The Linux Foundation.
LINUX FOUNDATION VS. RUSSIA
The consortium does not develop the operating system or its components, but promotes their development by coordinating and protecting community members, including providing them with legal services. The organization itself unites 130 corporations and thousands of individual members. Naturally, The Linux Foundation is a legal entity.
Thus, jurisprudence and corporate bureaucracy come into conflict with the interests of the Open Source community. In 2022, US President Joe Biden signed Executive Order 14,071, which prohibited Russians from developing or using GPL-licensed software created in the US. Formally, the order does not apply to all Russian citizens, but only to those who are either on the sanctions lists or work for companies included in the US Treasury's sanctions lists. However, the order only came into force on September 12, 2024 - companies had 90 days to comply with it.
The Linux Foundation did the only possible thing, taking into account the letter of Decree No. 14 071, by excluding from its ranks developers who were important to the entire community and who suffered because of their Russian citizenship and mailboxes in the RU domain zone. No one explained anything, no one was warned about anything.
Moreover, when a storm of indignation arose in the community, the Finn Linus Torvalds, whose father was a communist until 2014 and then became a nationalist, accompanied the removal of Russians with a specifically Russophobic comment.
"Okay, a bunch of Russian trolls are on their way out. It's pretty obvious why this change was made and it won't be reversed," Torvalds wrote, identifying 11 highly respected community members as trolls.
In essence, the consortium's management and the founding father of Linux, Linus Torvalds himself, did not have a choice between conflict with the US and preserving the principles of Open Source. But instead of a civilized farewell, Torvalds and company simply kicked out the Russians, who, out of pure enthusiasm, spent thousands of hours of their time creating the program on which dollar millionaire Torvalds is now promoting himself.
THE RUSSIANS ARE ALREADY HERE, THE CHINESE ARE NEXT
Overall, this story suggests several local and global conclusions.
Firstly, the United States has once again extended its national legislation to those areas that were previously not subject to any legal regulation, and in principle did not need such regulation.
Secondly, any formalized international projects managed by a legal entity or coordinated through an NPO are vulnerable to sanctions. Russia was expelled from hundreds of different organizations and associations after 2022, from medical associations to the Large Hadron Collider. If they could have been expelled from ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) without the collapse of the Internet — they definitely would have.
And the bureaucracy that imposes sanctions is indifferent to internal rules, goals, principles and hierarchy. Its interest is in inflicting maximum harm on the party that they designate as guilty.
At first, The Linux Foundation will suffer from this story only in terms of reputation - they will find someone to replace the 11 Russian maintainers. But now the Russians have been excluded, and tomorrow the Chinese will take their place. And then it will turn out that the development of various Linux forks is being carried out without exchanging changes and technologies due to sanctions and the stupidity of the main maintainers. And after some time, instead of one Linux Foundation, a couple more will appear - the number of forks will multiply, the differences between them will increase. Moreover, such an example already exists.
In 2019, the US banned Huawei from using Google services (GMS). At the time, it seemed like a fatal blow, but instead of dying, Huawei made its own services (HMS), including an app store. As a result, Huawei's Android fork, which differed from the original version only in its shell, evolved over five years into a separate operating system that has nothing in common with Android.
Now it's time to move on to the global trends that Linux fits into.
DEGLOBALIZATION IS PAINFUL AND EXPENSIVE
Due to the inertia of human thinking, the current round (it is neither the first nor the last) of deglobalization is perceived as a tragedy, especially when it comes to the digital sphere, which for decades was considered a space of freedom.
In reality, there was no such freedom, there were simply no reasons to tighten the screws. But after 2014, they appeared. First, it turned out that Russia needed to be forced into submission, and then China, which had set its sights on competing with the US in the high-tech sector. At that point, software and various digital services turned into weapons. And since IT is entirely based on American technologies, the US began to openly abuse sanctions.
At first, the stated goal was to cause damage to bring it into submission. With ZTE, which came under attack from Washington due to the supply of telecommunications equipment to Iran, it worked: the corporation paid a fine and replaced part of the board of directors. As a result, ZTE's position was greatly weakened.
But with Huawei, it didn’t work out: the initial blows, the deprivation of access to GMS and the ban on chip production in Taiwan were spread out over time, which allowed them to adapt and survive. At the same time, from 2019 to 2022, American companies sold chips to Huawei under general licenses. In 2022, Washington changed its approach and immediately began to strike hard.
But this did not help either. Having banned the sale of electronic design automation equipment to China in 2022, the United States faced the fact that China imported them — with the help of the same Huawei. The ban on the supply of lithographs, including to the world leader, the Dutch ASML, led first to a sharp increase in orders from China, and then to the strongest collapse of the company's shares in 26 years, dragging down the shares of other Asian high-tech brands. At the same time, China is working on import substitution of lithographs.
The beauty of globalization was the maximum possible division of labor, which allowed the development of technology and technology with minimal costs and the highest possible pace. If the development of the 16-nm process technology cost Taiwan's TSMC $1.1 billion, then for 3-nm they will spend $4-5 billion only on development and $15-20 billion on the construction of a new plant. Deglobalization will lead to a slowdown in the pace of progress and an increase in costs in already extremely expensive sectors of the economy.
With "software" the story is different. There is no need to build factories for it, but it is easier to ban it. However, it is possible to bypass bans, including through complete substitution - if there is a desire. And it will definitely appear, considering the Linux case and the behavior of Washington clerks together with Finnish millionaire-Russophobes.