Should Fedora banish Russians as they banished Iranians?
[Article 2 years old]
Reprinted with permission from the Free Software Fellowship.
In 2021, Ahmad Haghighi wrote about being erased from Fedora. Matthew Miller, Fedora Project Leader, didn't follow due process or give Haghighi any reason for erasure. He just vanished, as if one of Putin's vacuum bombs had been detonated under his computer.
US sanctions against Iran don't prohibit voluntary and academic pursuits, they only restrict financial relationships. The only woman to ever win the Fields medal is the Iranian academic Maryam Mirzakhani. Stanford University had no problems employing her, would Matthew Miller exclude this brilliant foreigner from Fedora just as he excluded Haghighi?
Other community members have made similar pleas for racial tolerance, for example, Justin Flory's blog on Red Hat and Iran.
Nonetheless, if Red Hat, Fedora and Matthew Miller are taking this hard line on people born in Iran, shouldn't they show exactly the some rudeness to developers from Russia and Belarus today?
In the last days, sanctions against Russia have been ratcheted up to the same level as sanctions against Iran. For example, Russia and Iran are both in the same special club for countries excluded from the SWIFT payment system.
If Russian musicians are banned from the West and even Russian paralympic athletes are being banned from the Winter Paralympics, shouldn't Red Hat apply exactly the same logic they used with Iranians and therefore start erasing Russian volunteers and employees?
If there is a Russian threat to free software, could it be any worse than the meddling of Google? Or the meddling of Microsoft?
People have recently expressed outrage about the way Debian's former leader Chris Lamb gave special benefits and travel funds to Albanian women in 2019. People are now joking that Putin already discovered this weakness in Debian security long before the Albanians. In this screenshot from DebConf17, we see Maria Glukhova (siamezzze) is the woman sitting closest to Holger Levson and Chris Lamb. If she was a Russian spy, isn't that exactly where Putin would want her to be?
There is no actual evidence that either Haghighi or Glukhova are spies.
Before being selected for Outreachy, Maria posted various pictures of herself:
We see that both Holger and Lamb were at the same table with the Albanian women in DebConf19, with serious questions hanging over their heads about how they qualified for travel funds:
At the Fellowship, we believe all volunteers should be treated equally and fairly, no matter whether they come from the Kremlin or if they are agents from the Pentagon like Paul Tagliamonte. █