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

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > So what we could ask, is that Savannah, Github or Sourceforge, and
  > Debian, Fedora or Ubuntu, stop to distribute free software in Russia.

We could make Savannah deny access from Russian domain address, but
why do that?

It would not impede anything the Russian government wants to to with
our softwsre.  It would not stop Russians from downloading our
software, as they could use mirror sites.  It _would_ stop people in
Russia from committing changes in our repositories, unless they use
Tor or a VPN.  That isn't hard to do, unless Putin has blocked it.

The main thing that would do is tell Russians, "You are Russian, so
you are scum."

Is it useful to treat Russians that way?  Would it help save Ukraine
or defeat Putin?  I don't think so.  That message is not a valid or
useful message to give to Russians.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)