One notable software business professional interviewed by RBC thought that the West’s decision would “adversely affect the life of the developer community, mutual trust within it, and therefore the quality of the product.”
It was Russia and other autocracies etc. that diminished the trust by actually financing developers for multiple years to first earn trust and finally introduce backdoors into open source software, as demonstrated by the XZ utils backdoor.
In open source projects, maintainers need to have some initial trust into each contributor, and let this trust naturally grow with time and contributions. They cannot perform intensive background checks on everyone before accepting a patch.
While it is easier to uncover backdoors in open source software, there is no good way to defend and prevent against this kind of attack in this type of development process. All open source projects can do is trying to take away some trust from people within higher risk groups. This of course might lead to discrimination.
A lot of this is a game of probabilities, which I don’t really think we have.
For instance if a normal human driver, without any automation, can prevent 80% of dangerous situations, but the automation can only prevent 50%, and in those situations the human savety driver can prevent only another 50%, because of inattention, this results in just 75% of dangerous situations prevented and the automation is worse.
Maybe someone knows the real probabilities, I don’t.