@Overly Serious is that first part saying the Russian government can't do anything about if someone does something they don't like. But the US government will?
Not quite. What I wrote works in both directions. Russian state actors could introduce an exploit and lean on Russian developers to not speak about it and the USA can do the same for their respective developers. But neither can reach the others. My point is that if you have both as active maintainers there are always maintainers that are out of the reach of somebody.
The confusion may have come in because
I live in the West so for
me I am greater risk from Western governments than I am from Russian or Chinese govt. Because I am immune to Russian and Chinese police unless I go there. Were I Russian the opposite would be true.
In any case, my point is that there are security laws usable on your own peopleto silence them and if you can put pressure on those people to go along with what you say, you've greatly facilitated the insertion of state backed exploits. The NSA did so with Windows. Therefore they would love to do so with Linux (esp. given its greater dominance on servers). The 'many eyes' principle which is supposed to stop this is weakened when you can threaten the - frankly rather small number of - eyes that look at any particular area you might introduce the exploit into.
Keep in mind that though the kernel / a kernel module is a prime target, if when this banning principle spreads what I say becomes more and more widely true. Also keep in mind that they ban not just Russians but have banned someone for protesting against the banning. Which is a nascent purity purge.
And also though Russians have mooted the idea of a hard fork, there's going to be a long lag between talking about a split and having clean separation. So for at least the immediate future this puts software the world uses under the sole control of American developers or allies / vassals.
The only ones I see trying to stop people from writing anything, are companies, and individuals. Short of espionage, and terrorism. Thanks to the first amendment, as long as it's not a threat, or slander you can pretty much say whatever you want without any government action.
That only applies to America. UK, Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand - they all lack the Freedom of Speech protections you talk about. The UK has not only jailed people for saying things or telling jokes they deem illegal, they've done so for jokes shared privately amongst personal friend groups (example, Grenfell fire joke in a private WhatsApp group). So yes, what you write is under restriction. But I wasn't solely talking about saying the wrong thing. I was talking about general state subversion of the technology we use for any purpose.
Just generally speaking I have a hard time understanding why people on either side genuinely think, Russia is better than the United States, or the United States is better than Russia. Both are going to do whatever they can to influence the rest of the world to get what they want. Both are going to try to get backdoors into whatever software they can, both will meddle in other countries business for their own interest.
The point is to have Russians being able and motivated to shout "US being bad" and the US to be able to say "Russia bad" as and when a malicious action to subvert open source code is taken. Splitting things means free and motivated watchmen are removed. Which is worse out of the USA or Russia on a personal level, depends which you live in. Outside of very exceptional circumstances, a private citizen only needs to be afraid of their own government not an adversarial foreign one. If I say Navalny is a hero, Putin can do nothing about it. If I say Tommy Robinson was, the Bongistani govt. can (and has to people).
Also even if you love hyperbole, there's still degrees of accountability here. You won't be thrown into prison for 15 years for saying that your president sucks and donating to the opposition, for starters. This makes the country you live in better by default.
Again, I live in Britain. A woman was convicted of saying a muslim was a muslim last week. Within two months of Tony Blair passing anti-terrorism law that allowed warrentless surveillance (RIPA), a local council had used it to convict someone of not picking up their dog mess. Lauren Southern was banned (and still is, I think) under terrorism laws for, well, they never said.
Compromised software stacks by the State allow it to bypass many legal protections.
And though I've leaned on Bongland for my examples, I don't especially trust the govt. of the USA either. I mean, who does? None of my argument was "trust Russia more". It was "I like it when they're watching each other for anything that might harm me".
