Both examples you listed are open source, so anyone can review their code. No government can dictate what gets published to the code, and if they can, it will be noticed and get forked.
This probably sounds pedantic but based on this the issue isn’t that the software is Russian. It’s that the software is under the regulation of an authoritarian government (which is Russia)
Precisely. If kaspersky were 100% open source, I would not have said what I did. But it’s closed source, and it’s owned by a Russian company, subject to Russian laws, and Russia is a authoritarian state, hostile to most of the world at this point - either directly or indirectly - so one would be forgiven for assuming the worst, in terms of what was put in the code at the FSB’s behest.
The difference is that someone from one of the countries we’ve discussed can contribute to software projects that they like, without fear of rejection for simply who they are.
And that matters to a lot of people, including me. Not everyone is lucky like you all of being born in the right place at the right time.
Both examples you listed are open source, so anyone can review their code. No government can dictate what gets published to the code, and if they can, it will be noticed and get forked.
This probably sounds pedantic but based on this the issue isn’t that the software is Russian. It’s that the software is under the regulation of an authoritarian government (which is Russia)
Precisely. If kaspersky were 100% open source, I would not have said what I did. But it’s closed source, and it’s owned by a Russian company, subject to Russian laws, and Russia is a authoritarian state, hostile to most of the world at this point - either directly or indirectly - so one would be forgiven for assuming the worst, in terms of what was put in the code at the FSB’s behest.
Correct, but it’s a distinction without a difference.
The difference is that someone from one of the countries we’ve discussed can contribute to software projects that they like, without fear of rejection for simply who they are.
And that matters to a lot of people, including me. Not everyone is lucky like you all of being born in the right place at the right time.