They still do a lot of development for Linux projects. If that changes Linux is screwed as who is going to replace them.

Linux has become captured by the US empire

Open source code means though that we as a community can look over things, but that's means we need to actually do it instead of just saying that

Your logic is sound.

The motive and skillet are certainly there.

But there sure are many eyes on RedHat's source code, and IBM has a lot to lose if they got caught putting in a back door.

Plus, the US government uses it for their own sensitive stuff, so one would hope they have the wisdom not to shit where they eat, installing a back door that 100% would get used against them.

None of my arguments really outweigh yours, if I'm honest.

But I also don't blame anyone who trusts RedHat Linux, today.

Most of the fundamental packages in your Linux distribution are primarily written by Red Hat. Do you use Glibc, GCC, gnu utils, systemd, GNOME, podman, pipewire, Wayland, Xorg, or Flatpak for starters?

Red Hat is hardly a free rider in the open source world.

It is also worth noting that Red Hat created the Fedora Project. They created it so they could have RHEL (corporate) and Fedora (community) instead of just Red Hat Linux which they had before.

It always makes me laugh when people worry about Red Hat “taking Fedora corporate”. Fedora was created explicitly to be the community offering and is a key part of the Red Hat strategy. I guess not everybody knows their Linux history.

Many of the Fedora leaders and maintainers are Red Hat employees.

As for US influence, that has always been a thing. US law dominates the thinking. What you really need to worry about is the Linux Foundation.

any FOSS project being used to benefit a profit driven company

That's a tough thing to avoid with android and a BSD out there powering most of the phones on the planet.

I hate what rh have done to enterprise Linux, but you need to keep clear what they're selling and what they're buying.

They provide support licenses for enterprise Linux but dont make money off Linux directly. They also foot a LOT of development on projects and apps that aren't systemd and are thus not a cancer on Linux. Please explore more with an open mind.

So moving to a BSD then? Linux is mostly packages written by big tech. People have to eat.

Debian has always attracted zealots, many of whom were extremely... impolite... during the systemd wars, on both sides of that schism. Sadly, as in most things, the majority of reasonable, quiet, hard working community members get drowned out because, well, they're reasonable, quiet and hardworking.

(sexism, ableism, complete delusion, I've gone insane reading this website...)

I know nothing about the history and politics of Debian, but the stuff this guy is saying is bizzare.

• Timeline starts with the publication of Orwell's Animal Farm. This is going to be good...

• He seems to interpret people's personal lives as caused by Debian - talking about Joel Espy Klecker's death, he makes it sound like the Evil Debians were chaining him to a rock and forcing him to write software, even describing it as "modern slavery" - does he think that people wih chronic illnesses shouldn't contribute to free software?? Unless someone was actually coercing Klecker (which would obviously be bad), it seems like he was just choosing to contribute... Pocock asks if it's fair that Klecker received no compensation despite companies that use Debian making lots of money. That's how free software works...

• Daniel Pocock refers to Daniel Pocock in the third person a lot, which makes it less obvious that this is his firsthand account and not someone else's documenting of the story.

• "The Debian Pregnancy Cluster" (???)

• Claiming that women are only participating in Debian because of their male partners. Followed by a mention of a woman who met their husband through Debian (so was presumably involved in it independently before that).

• Spends a lot of time listing people who died, even if their death is unrelated to their Debian participation. There's even a graphic of people holding knives at the bottom, as if to imply that Debian is murdering people??

• Quote "wheelchair fascism" - I am just going to provide this quote in full: "Bücherratten is demonstrating a certain amount of passive-aggressive behavior, wheeling herself up to the FSFE table at CCC, putting on the brakes and using her wheelchair to become the center of attention even before she speaks." What the hell? I have no words here... What does this person expect? They've just described someone using a wheelchair to go up to a table in a normal way. They don't elaborate on becoming the center of attention. This is equivalent to describing an ambulatory person's "passive aggressive behavior, walking up to the FSFE table at CCC, putting their feet on the floor, and using their legs to become the center of attention" (https://danielpocock.com/en/fosdem-nazi-pass-fsfe-wheelchair-fascism-facts/)

This is really something to complain to government about.

You have to be invited to Epstein's to make an impact like this

I think this is the right take on this.

All of this is fundamentally rooted in legal compliance things and the only reason you can see any western open source organizations not following suit is because their "violation" has flown under the radar so far. While going European-based helps with a lot of other US bullshit, in this case it doesn't because the sanction situation is largely the same across most of the world. You could go with one of those Chinese or Russian (maybe Indian?) distributions I suppose, but those come with their own problems.

Even if you're prepared to make your own Linux distribution - If you're in the US, Europe, or much of the rest of the world, you're in the same legal situation as all the existing projects and risk criminal persecution for violating sanctions. Well, in theory at least, I haven't heard of many arrests or convictions actually happening because of open source software. If you want to gamble on it never actually happening then sure, go ahead.

As humans we like our agency, which makes it tempting to think of \<any world problem\> as something that can be solved by making mildly inconvenient lifestyle decisions, but unfortunately that's just not how things work at this scale. Solving this issue requires lifting the sanctions, which requires a successful left wing (or at least left leaning) political movement to happen in a large chunk of the world. It's perfectly fine to also make that lifestyle decision, but it's important to keep the bigger picture in mind.

Clarification edit: At the same thing, it's also important to see that the problem is happening, so signal boosting blog posts like this absolutely has value despite all of this.

But why does that matter?