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Comment by u8080

8 days ago

I am not claiming "invention", my whole point here is that place of origin means nothing, especially for a FOSS project - despite Linus being important part of it.

If we talk about OS being independent from US, the culprit is where does control(both in terms of technology and legislation) comes from. Main contributors are US companies(technological control) while Linus is obligated to comply to US laws and decisions as US citizen.

Active kernel contributors are spread all around the world, with a pretty even distribution across USA, Western Europe and Asia.

Your suggestion that the US government would lean on the citizenship of Torvalds in order to exert control over the kernel should be laughable but I concede that anything is possible these days.

  • Yeah, Nah, 0 chance.

    Linus Torvalds, imo, is the reason we have open source, through Linux & Git. He’s the open source philosopher king.

    I think he’s put enough in to know where his allegiance lies, over a 2010 US citizenship - a very different world.

    There is also 0 chance, US/MS government hasn’t put a lot of pressure on him over the last 34 years of creating and spreading, at least the OS form of socialism

  • It is not laughable, Linux directly complies with SDN list[1] and US sanction policy(i.e. removing of russian developers by Linus). Thus, US does have and execute control over Linux kernel currently.

    [1] https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/navigating-global-regul...

    • I think you have some confusion about the role of the Linux Foundation in relation to the kernel. They provide financial, organisational, and infrastructural support and neither own nor control its development.

      Linus is the BDFL and lead maintainer and if he wanted to move the kernel development anywhere else he could do so, but Linus Torvalds has stated that he personally agrees with them.

      That is not the US controlling him, it is his own decision. Moreover he has dual citizenship and could renounce his US citizenship if he chose. When Greg takes over maintainership things may be different.

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