This mix of ideological and corporate backing may make Linux and certain similar projects seem "too big to fail", but the only reason Russia, China and India (and indeed certain western corporations) hasn't completely ignored all or parts of the GNU Public License is because its rise in popularity coincides with the world turning unipolar: the Linux kernel was released in 1991, the same year the Soviet Union toppled over and fell apart.
This way of writing as if Russia, China and India are undifferentiated monoliths, often while affording "The West" the courtesy of being comprised of individuals, is really grating.
These countries also consist of individuals, and these people also create and contribute to FOSS. Perhaps to a lesser extent, due to cultural and economic reasons (as the author speculates), but they contribute nonetheless.
The author seems to ignore one of the most practical reasons for contributing to FOSS (and the argument behind the Open Source movement when it broke from Free Software). It's often cheaper and simpler to play ball (i.e. contribute back instead of maintaining your own patches in perpetuity).
I do buy the argument to some extent that American global dominance is helpful in enforcing free software licenses overseas, but it's definitely not the full picture and there will always be people contributing to FOSS regardless of whether there's a state that enforces licenses.
we probably shouldn't hold our breath waiting for anything substantial to show up in any FOSS repository from sanctioned countries
Nginx is Russian. I would call that pretty substantial.
Yeah I find the way he deals with "China, India and Russia" pretty irksome and borderline racist as someone who lives on the other side of the world. Fundamentally his point about surplusses enabling OSS is true and hence developed nations would end up sponsoring OSS however the fact that these countries don't participate in OSS is just wrong. Yes, at a state level these countries may not sponsor FOSS the way developed countries do. However, many of them do participate in different ways. Most GSoC contributors come from developing nations. I'm sure anyone who has mentored GSoC will know the number of Indian students who apply for it. I also know a large number of russian open source maintainers. Further there are numerous immigrants from these countries who move to the west and lead FOSS projects. I would argue in China's case the biggest issue is the language barrier and not the ideology of FOSS itself. There are many hacker groups within china doing FOSS work in Chinese.
> Yeah I find the way he deals with "China, India and Russia" pretty irksome and borderline racist as someone who lives on the other side of the world.
The term you're looking for is "cultural racism" (or sometimes "neo-racism" or "modern racism"). As an aside, I dislike all those variants, and would prefer something like "culturism" or the perfectly applicable terms " nationalism, "xenophobia", and "mixophobia" (or, to mention a common highly specific form, "islamophobia").
On the other hand, "cultural racism" seems like an appropriate term when a highly diverse (nationally, linguistically, ethnically, culturally, etc.) group such as "Muslims" gets racialized into a prejudicial stereotype.
Anyway, it is basically essentialism applied to culture instead of race: the ideas and arguments of both are deeply tangled, with cultural arguments often used as proxies for racial ones where the latter would be rejected out of hand. For example you see it pop up in demands that immigrants assimilate, or claims that immigrants don't (or won't) assimilate used as justification for discrimination. It can also appear as a mixophobic demand for cultural segregation. Or, as here, cultural differences apparently used as a veiled form of nationalism.
This mix of ideological and corporate backing may make Linux and certain similar projects seem "too big to fail", but the only reason Russia, China and India (and indeed certain western corporations) hasn't completely ignored all or parts of the GNU Public License is because its rise in popularity coincides with the world turning unipolar: the Linux kernel was released in 1991, the same year the Soviet Union toppled over and fell apart.
This way of writing as if Russia, China and India are undifferentiated monoliths, often while affording "The West" the courtesy of being comprised of individuals, is really grating.
These countries also consist of individuals, and these people also create and contribute to FOSS. Perhaps to a lesser extent, due to cultural and economic reasons (as the author speculates), but they contribute nonetheless.
The author seems to ignore one of the most practical reasons for contributing to FOSS (and the argument behind the Open Source movement when it broke from Free Software). It's often cheaper and simpler to play ball (i.e. contribute back instead of maintaining your own patches in perpetuity).
I do buy the argument to some extent that American global dominance is helpful in enforcing free software licenses overseas, but it's definitely not the full picture and there will always be people contributing to FOSS regardless of whether there's a state that enforces licenses.
we probably shouldn't hold our breath waiting for anything substantial to show up in any FOSS repository from sanctioned countries
Nginx is Russian. I would call that pretty substantial.