Notices by Julius Schwartzenberg (jschwart@mas.to), page 2

@rms it is unfortunate and a loss for the Russian language culture of which a significant part is by Ukrainian artists.

At the same time it is understandable and one cannot control the emotions they attach to hearing particular. There may be situations of trauma too that might be triggered by hearing Russian after being imprisoned there.

German was not the most popular language in the Netherlands during/right after WW2. For many years now German is no problem at all. These things take time.

@hughsie I guess most of this firmware is still provided as a binary blob or is there also firmware that can be studied, modified, etc.?

At this point I do not feel comfortable with the idea of normalizing the process of updating firmware blobs more or less automatically on my system without having any insight regarding behavioural changes.

Do you see any way to address this?

@amszmidt yeah you are right. I do think they can help a lot to create extra trust towards free software, at a level that non-free software can never have. But it indeed does not relate directly to software freedom. Regarding the challenges, I think reproducible builds would be a strong selling point for adoption by governments.

@amszmidt hmm, maybe the other way around? When the Dutch COVID applications came, they used some sort of notary process to assure the binaries were generated from a particular source revision. As citizens are faced with programs by their governments, it is important to have legal requirements for any distributed binaries to have matching source code along with bit-for-bit reproducability.
Maybe you trust free software like GNU, but will you trust it just the same from your government? :)

@amszmidt I'm curious why you suggest this? I guess you are familiar with https://www.gnu.org/software/mes/manual/html_node/Reproducible-Builds.html

@lxo it seems that these LTS versions of the kernel Linux were mainly useful for non-GNU operating systems like Android? I'm curious to learn about your take on how this affects GNU and other free systems. (Also in light of GNU Linux-libre.) Incompatibility tends to be a bigger problem for those lacking source code.

@lxo @lnxw48a1@nu.federati.net the video starts with the idea that Russia is open to negotiations. The expectation both inside and outside Ukraine is however that any form of ongoing occupation that would result from that would cost more lives (due to the way people are treated in occupied territories) and result in more land grab by Russia in the future despite whatever was negotiated. Simply put while it seems this war is costing lives, Ukraine expects any long-term ongoing occupation to cost even more lives.

@lxo famous guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Blumenthal

His video is not so convincing as he purposely says "Vladimir Zelenskyy" instead of "Volodymyr Zelenskyy" and is mixing in known falsehoods from Russian propaganda.
Audits and extreme care with such spending are important, but such people only harm that cause with such actions.

@lxo sounds like a good start! I wrote I'm still learning Ukrainian as well. I have studied Russian and a little bit of Polish prior though, which is helping a lot.
I use GoldenDict on Trisquel as a dictionary btw. I'm always interested in more free tools that could help. In the past I used KWordQuiz to practice vocabulary.

@lxo це дуже цікаво що ви теж вивчатите українску мову!! Я думаю що це добрий можливість щоб підтримувати Україну. Мені ще треба богато вивчатите...

@lxo I understand your conclusion, but it doesn't take all prior history and detailed facts on the ground into consideration. Generally the history of the Slavic countries is an interesting topic. One aspect that is relevant is for instance the treatment of the Ukrainian language in the occupied territories.

What changes would NATO require so that all countries in it are on equal standing?

@lxo your points regarding the US meddling on other continents are valid. For the idea you pose on Ukraine to be convincing, it would be important to elaborate why Russia is not the primary cause of the situation. At this point (Eastern) Europe does not trust Russia due to their past experience. Russia meddled in Europe, while the US gained a lot of trust with the Marshall Plan.

How could Ukraine and maybe also Europe move to a situation with autonomy?

@lxo
Regarding Russophobia, the pattern is older than any US involvement. The US/NATO are the first arming the Ukrainian army themselves. Formally the Budapest Memorandum binds the US and UK to supporting Ukraine.

We have to see how the future will be and do our best to support Ukraine and similar places. It is true that we should be cautious regarding the US intentions. Russia's own actions and history sadly made it a far worse option prior to any involvement from US/NATO.

@lxo here is a copy of the book:
https://archive.org/details/MaroussiaAMaidOfUkraine
(Its from 1890, now public domain.)

Throughout history Ukraine often ended up in situations where they had to choose one side over another side.
They have a lot of (classic) literature that relates to freedom. There were few moments in history they really had autonomy. Given the history of Ukraine "have just been" is sadly not accurate and the US/NATO are offering more outlook towards freedom and autonomy than any party prior.

@lxo that makes sense. In that case I hope you will get opportunities to travel to Ukraine and/or meet with Ukrainians. Maybe somebody from Ukraine could reply too. Of course if there turns out to be evidence showing unfairness of Ukrainian elections that would be good to share.

I hope you find time to read the book. It is written by a Russian writer who moved to Ukraine. The essence is that Ukrainians simply want the freedom to be themselves in between Russia and Poland.

@lxo whether the US role has been a good one or not is definitely debatable. Whether a coup d'était was promoted is different from whether one took place. That the elections since 2014 ended up being fair is not based on propaganda, but on evidence. While I can agree that the US did not do optimal diplomacy, there are other arguments that are more convincing that ended up triggering the war than the US provoking it.
A book I can recommend is Marusya (Maroussia) by Marko Vovchok.

@lxo the problem with articles like these (there have been quite a few) is that they fail to recognize the sovereignty aspect of countries in joining NATO. One would need to argue that countries like Poland, Romania, etc. joined NATO without support of their population. Similarly at this point the majority of the Ukrainians stand behind their country joining the EU and also NATO. Without addressing this aspect, it is hard to convincingly put such blame on the US.