Under the new law, developers of unregistered open source software can be prosecuted under the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation

The growing pressure of the West on Russia requires the adoption of effective measures in the field of legislation. Thus, recently the State Duma approved in the third reading bills No. 346588-8, No. 346769-8 and No. 346750-8, according to which Russians are prohibited from participating in foreign non-profit organizations that are not included in a special register. The main stages of the adoption of the new law have already been passed, it remains only to wait for its final signing by the President.

The vast majority of major free software projects, including the Linux kernel, Debian distribution, Firefox browser, programming languages ​​Python, PHP, Perl, Rust, LibreOffice office suites, OpenOffice, Apache http server, and many others, are developing, being designed as non-profit organizations, which facilitates the distribution of donations to pay programmers.

The vagueness of the law’s criteria allows it to be subject to action, including sending a patch or reporting a bug. Domestic companies working on import substitution, such as ALT Linux, Astra Linux, Rosa Linux, etc., can also be brought under new criminal articles, since their activities are related to the exchange of information between initial projects located abroad.