Most people kind of just assumed that open source was immune from politics, and now that illusion is being shattered. I expect that long term this will lead to bifurcation of technology between the G7 and BRICS. We’re already seeing Chinese companies go their own way, and stuff like OpenHarmony is a direct product of US sanctions.
If the west is going to continue to act petulantly then countries outside the west will have no choice but to fork projects like Linux kernel and develop them on their own. This could backfire spectacularly on the west as these could end up forks becoming more popular than the original projects soaking up the talent around the world. We saw this scenario play out on a smaller scale when Oracle acquired Sun and declared that they owned MySQL, Hudson, and OpenOffice. Forks sprung up overnight and now the original projects are effectively dead.
Most people kind of just assumed that open source was immune from politics, and now that illusion is being shattered. I expect that long term this will lead to bifurcation of technology between the G7 and BRICS. We’re already seeing Chinese companies go their own way, and stuff like OpenHarmony is a direct product of US sanctions.
If the west is going to continue to act petulantly then countries outside the west will have no choice but to fork projects like Linux kernel and develop them on their own. This could backfire spectacularly on the west as these could end up forks becoming more popular than the original projects soaking up the talent around the world. We saw this scenario play out on a smaller scale when Oracle acquired Sun and declared that they owned MySQL, Hudson, and OpenOffice. Forks sprung up overnight and now the original projects are effectively dead.