Sanction against Russia and its impact on FDroid

Relan, the builder of Fennec, is based in Russia (not discriminating him/her)

According to Gitlab:

they have suspended new business in Russia and Belarus.
GitLab actions to date regarding Russian invasion of Ukraine

Mull is a fork of Fennec.
Does each Firefox release have new trackers to be removed? (Is Mull dependant on the work of Relan currently?)
If Gitlab go further and stop all operations in Russia, will these two projects be continued?

I think someone might come up with solutions but wonder how things might develop :thinking:

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If I may quote All Bundy : Software and Internet go together like a horse and carriage

Only an idiot politician believes that you can split the internet.

Let’s wait a few weeks until the brains of the politicians fill up with oxygen again and until then we take care of something else.

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@idroid25 “new businesses” not users…

Be careful what you say. The “community” may not like even the most innocuous or informative comments.

Signed - Suppressed but opposing Russian military attack and standing with Ukraine regardless

You were offtopic…

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Duh. I even quoted that
I asked “if”…

Does each Firefox release have new trackers to be removed?

No, it’s all the same set of proprietary bits in each Firefox release. The scripts and patches that remove those bits need to be adjusted every time though.

Is Mull dependant on the work of Relan currently?

Mull uses this work (fennecbuild). Tad (Mull’s maintainer) actually contributes to fennectbuild too.

If Gitlab go further and stop all operations in Russia, will these two projects be continued?

I don’t think GitLab will block access from Russian IPs. If it does, I’ll probably migrate to another hosting.

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Ah nice to hear from you!

I see. Seems like no need to worry about

Thanks for your contribution! And also Tad’s

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It is offtopic to hypothesize a reason for possible disappearance (or name change) of unusually named software (Edit: apparently from Russia), ? Surprise to me! So sorry for offense (not really). :smiley:

This is a good point of view on this topic IMHO:

As for sanctions affecting Russians’ access to gitlab.com, if they do that, we need to push back on them. There is legal precedent for it, for example, Google Play used to block Iranian users because they believed they had to under the sanctions. But then civil society groups (I was involved) lobbied Google to only apply the sanctions to paid apps, since that’s what the sanctions were about. So they then allowed Iranian users access to gratis apps.

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About the node-ipc module, that wasn’t “protestware”, that was malware. This is not an opinion, it is a reality.

Calling it protestware, in addition to being false, reduces the severity of the situation, which is quite serious IMO.

The fact that it was not really sophisticated makes it even worse, any system minimally protected by sandboxes would have been saved, so it has only affected the users, bravo :clap:

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Oh the ironies, if you can believe Wikipedia:

On October 30, 2018, GitLab Inc. is considered the first partly Ukrainian unicorn valued more than $1 billion.

On August 11, 2018, GitLab Inc. moved from Microsoft Azure to Google Cloud Platform, making the service inaccessible to users in Crimea, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria, due to sanctions imposed by Office of Foreign Assets Control of the United States.

Re gitlab actions statement:

Let’s be kind to one another during this tragic period, as we hope for a peaceful resolution.

Sounds like too much wishful thinking by now, after what has happened since 11 March.

Re stupid response-ware bordering on malware generally, has Tusky removed its Rick Roll, or been tagged or sanctioned for it yet?

At least Anonymous sends people a relevant informative message. Do they use F/LOSS…

PS Could the forum login get rid of “With (Microsoft’s) Github” or add With Gitlab?

Given all the recent craziness with the internet, it seems like we need to get more mirrors around the world. I did a quick survey of Debian mirrors that support HTTPS that are in regions where F-Droid currently has poor coverage:

If anyone of you are in these countries or speak the related languages, please ask if they’ll also host F-Droid on their mirror.

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The author of a related topic deleted their account. So I will summarize it here.

The government of the russian empire apparently is “investing 100 million into the project” of taking the GPLv3 code of F-Droid / Client · GitLab, rebranding it and presenting it as their work without either publishing the modified source code or attributing the original developers.

A Telegram post by my friend from Kramatorsk, Ukraine:

The news website it links to:

A fediverse thread mentioned on the website:

As usual, the fediverse community is deeply concerned. They hypothesize somebody can write the developer a collective letter asking to publish the sources. They are going to waiting a month before complaining about the outrageous government actions to, uh, the government. And of course they are discussing whether anyone in the russian empire is actually obliged to follow GPL.

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Those point to some other domain, that’s not working here

Check these too:

We’re tracking this internally here:
https://gitlab.com/fdroid/admin/-/issues/319

Maybe an offtopic aside, but I can’t see #319,

or #318, 313, 302, 300,

294-279, 275, 273, 272, 269, 266, 265

on first and second pages of: Issues · F-Droid / admin · GitLab

Why are so many invisible?

You said there are: 319
It says there are all: 258

Does that mean 61/319 or nearly 20% of admin issues are hidden from public?

Some issues are private yes.

20% seems like a lot to be hidden behind the curtain. Strange.

Do speak your mind freely, just repeating 20% does not make it “even more strange”.