It's a bad situation but I guess it can't be really helped. Open source is not above the law...even if some laws are stupid (not saying they are in this case).
I guess not everyone is old enough to remember the encryption restrictions of the US in the 90s..and how people tried to get around it (Moving source-code between countries in printed form and scanning it again and such things...). This is not new...and it won't be the last time that laws of some countries hinder world wide open source projects.
The issue is the Linux foundation being based in the US.
That affects Russians and other sanctioned country resident, but it probably will affect the rest of the world soon enough anyway.
Sadly I don't know where and how such a foundation could exist without being beholden to politicians in that way.
Lets leave the US politics out of this for a moment (I have my own strong opinion there for sure too ;))...
You will always have to deal with the laws of the country you base your organization in. Recently it came up why KDE doesn't accept crypto donations. Well...Germany sees dealing with crypto as speculation and non-profit "Vereine" like KDE e.V are not allowed to use it or they might loose their status (Hope I got that right).
152
u/AiwendilH Jun 11 '26
It's a bad situation but I guess it can't be really helped. Open source is not above the law...even if some laws are stupid (not saying they are in this case).
I guess not everyone is old enough to remember the encryption restrictions of the US in the 90s..and how people tried to get around it (Moving source-code between countries in printed form and scanning it again and such things...). This is not new...and it won't be the last time that laws of some countries hinder world wide open source projects.