Re: Should distros take steps to reduce russian access to Free Software?

[Valentino Giudice]

Which makes absolutely no sense.

It's not the job of the FSF to side with Ukraine, or in general to
take a side in wars. Those that support the FSF can have any opinion
about any topic unrelated to free software and their money and support
shouldn't be used to take a stand on separate issues.

But even if it did take a stand on this (it's still not clear to me
why access to free software is any more of a concern than access to
anything else, and access to anything else is being regulated through
sanctions which are decided by governments), it would fail.

There is absolutely nothing preventing anyone who supports Russia, or
who simply disagrees with restricting access to software, from
mirroring all software programs distributed by the FSF, and any free
GNU/Linux distro.

As for Debian, it has a social contract: https://www.debian.org/social_contract

I believe that not distributing software to a particular part of the
world that was using their software before would be against paragraph
4.
First, free software is a priority. Not any other political stance. So
trying to support Ukraine by reducing free software access in Russia
goes against this principle.
Second, and more importantly, users are a priority. So preventing
Russian users (not just individuals, but companies and government
agencies too) from accessing updates to software they use goes after
that principle.

Some would argue that Debian should take a stand in this because
people in Ukraine are users too, but that would be a terrible
argument. The intention of that paragraph and the meaning of the word
"user" are obviously such that users are a priority *as such* (i.e.
because they are users, and are helped by Debian as users).

Otherwise, the mission of Debian could simply be "we make the world a
better place". None in good faith would ever support such an
organization because you can't know what you are actually supporting.
An organization which does whatever the person in charge thinks is
good, regardless of topic, regardless of what the organization
promises, is a fundamentally corrupt organization.

The same applies to the FSF: preventing access to free software in
Russia would in no way help software freedom, nor would it help free
software users as such, and thus it's not something the FSF should do.