11 Russian Developers Banned by Linux Foundation
On October 22, Greg Kroah-Hartman, the second-in-command at Linux Foundation, removed 11 Russian developers from the list of kernel maintainers. Most of them were responsible for various drivers.
In the comments, Greg mentioned that the removal was due to sanctions, and that the developers might come back if they provide “sufficient documentation.” No one really understood what that meant. Also, he deleted not according to the established guideline, but bypassed it and as a result the developers were not even on the CREDITS list, i.e. all their efforts were wiped out.
After some attempts to figure it out, Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, wrote two days later:
It’s entirely clear why the change was done, it’s not getting reverted, and using multiple random anonymous accounts to try to “grass root” it by Russian troll factories isn’t going to change anything. <…> If you haven’t heard of Russian sanctions yet, you should try to read the news some day. And by “news”, I don’t mean Russian state-sponsored spam. As to sending me a revert patch - please use whatever mush you call brains. I’m Finnish. Did you think I’d be supporting Russian aggression? Apparently it’s not just lack of real news, it’s lack of history knowledge too.
When users pointed out the unclear reasoning and asked for a proper explanation, he added:
No, but I’m not a lawyer, so I’m not going to go into the details that I - and other maintainers - were told by lawyers. I’m also not going to start discussing legal issues with random internet people who I seriously suspect are paid actors and/or have been riled up by them.
To me, this is complete crap. So much for open source. I get it, US sanctions and all that, but couldn’t they have come up with some sort of reasonable explanation? People contributed to this project voluntarily, only to be banned because they’re Russian. Great. Yeah, I’m pissed.
See the post on ycombinator. Link to the patch with deletion
