What is the /e/ stance on current Russian military aggression in Ukraine? Is it going to interfere with the working and distribution of /e/ in Russia in any way?
Currently many companies not only provide support for Ukraine, but decide to sever ties with Russia: companies from McDonald’s and IKEA to Intel and Microsoft have decided to stop having business with Russia.
More that that; there have been rumors circulating in Russian social media about the possibility that Apple, Microsoft, Google or Android phone vendors might issue updates that will brick the devices of Russian users. People are instructed how to turn off updates for their devices to become immune to the possible OTA bricking.
Now, one could say that it is contrary to the spirit of open source to knowingly restrict working of hardware in any way, but look how e.g. OpenBLAS decided to drop support for the Russian Elbrus architecture.
Ideally, I would like to get the response of the creators of /e/ on their stance in the currently ongoing and possible future conflicts: will software such as /e/ try to change its behavior to block undesired persons or countries from using it or will its authors say they are not in a position to do such thing?
That falls under the far-fetched but you must believe it a little to have mentioned it. You think those companies would do such a thing to regular, innocent, civilian, everyday users just because of what their leaders are doing?
Imagine the backlash if any of them were to do such a thing (or even consider).
EDIT: What little trust there is left for GAFAM or hardware vendors like ZTE and Xiaomi, imagine what would happen if the above scenario were true. It would show the populace how much power these companies really have. The fall would be hard. They would never risk it.
Please keep this forum free from political discussions. We all have our personal likes and dislikes. That being said this site is an /e/OS support and technical discussion forum. We will continue to support users from all countries. Citizens or users are not responsible for the actions of politicians.
Agreed. The situation in Ukraine is far too complex for simplistic responses. Having said that and remembering the adage that the first casualty in war is ‘truth’, I would suggest that it’s probably good for Russian citizens to receive information from out side their borders and that is not ‘manage’ by the state apparatus.
Everything is political. Politics are about values and ethics. Big companies collecting personal data is very political. Opposing it is even more political. This forum is full of all kinds of political discussions. I don´t necessarily want to discuss about Ukraine war here, there are much better forums elsewhere for it, but let´s call things what they are. Censorship is the last thing I want to get a feel of here. And it makes me feel very uncomfortable.