Phoronix: Several Linux Kernel Driver Maintainers Removed Due To Their Association To Russia

For me as an old fart this all sounds like such a stupid thing... who cares if someone who volunteer to work for an software project is a Russian, German, Iranian or - God forbid - an Frenchman. My personal - and of course completely insignificant - opinion is that politics should stay out.

Also from seemingly reasonable commenters there are many arguments around security coming up. I don't get how one can jump to that idea? This obviously has nothing to do with security, it's about sanction compliance. And yes, likely a pretty pointless sanction compliance in this instance, as the sanctioned entities don't have a direct benefit from having an employee name mentioned in the kernel. However that's not how sanctions work, both just because, and also intuitively it makes sense: Sanctions wouldn't be enforcable at scale if every single case would have to be judged on merit - it's hard enough to enforce them as is.

And btw I so hope most of the comments on here are Russian trolls, but I fear many are people that fully drunk the Russian trolls' cool-aid and are now fully brainwashed...

As a Finnish person I wholeheartedly agree with Linus.

Couldn't think of a more lemmy thread topic than one involving both Russian geopolitics and linux.

Hello Internet commenters. Please remember that there's no rule that says you need to tell us all your gut reaction to this if you know absolutely nothing about the situation.

Dude, WHAT. This is totally against what Linux and Open source in general stand for.

I don't support the thing that I'm sure was their reason for this but I definitely don't support banning someone from contributing to an open system solely off nationality.

So what eventually only the "good guys" can contribute to and use open source software? Who exactly decides who the "good guys" are in this scenario? USA? China?

The implications of what this can cause in the future for potentially all of the open source community is absolutely sad. We should welcome all our fellow human beings to contributing to open source.

Kernel development is for only.

"Compliance requirements"? The kernel's american now?! WTF?

The commonality of all these maintainers being dropped? They appear to all be Russian or associated with Russia. Most of them with .ru email addresses.

Not short-sighted in the least...

Similarly, the driver code remains within the kernel -- including for Russian hardware such as around the Baikal CPUs from Russia's Baikal Electronics.

Not a hypocrite move at all...

Are israeli developers blocked as well? How about all american developers considering how the US foreign policy keeps fucking everyone up all over the place in the name of liberty and freedom... of oil?

I am quite disappointed at the lack of transparency regarding this.

This is a shame, I always thought Linux was supposed to be an International collaboration, hate to see it caught up in this bullshit political agenda.

it's a pity that politics is penetrating more and more into open source and FOSS.

recently support for Russian cloud providers was cut out of opentofu. https://github.com/opentofu/registry/pull/824

now this. this is, of course, natural the core and many components of modern distributions have not been free in terms of decision-making for a long time and are under the influence of large companies, which in turn are under the influence of the USA.

I think the Russians that would want to backdoor stuff would just use a name like John.

Now what the actual fuck

Linus gives it a full green light and refers to negative reactions as Russian bot attacks

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linus-Torvalds-Russian-Devs

Gotta have them "various compliance requirements", man, gotta have'em. Don't ask me what they are, but damnit, gotta have'em.

I'm definitely all for Ukraine winning, but this is bullshit, basically the red scare all over again (but for tech).

This is dumb. Corporate divestment, sure, of course, fuck their money and their power structures. But open-source developers are not generally gung-ho about the war effort... let alone propping up their local military-industrial complex.

Linus is an absolute cunt for not only following this gleefully but then attributing pushback to "russian trolls" and "state propaganda" fuck you man.

These people weren't the MIT pricks who inserted vulnerabilities into the kernel, they were contributors who did hard work and helped advance FREE software. Linus is now turning his back on the GPL and manning it clear that Linux can be controlled by the US state on a whim.

Linus Torvalds Confirms Decision to Remove Maintainers from Russia

You couldn't come up with a more powerful spit in the direction of FOSS. And from Linus, who is now kind of showing f*ck to the entire community. Here you have freedom, openness and all that. Today they just wiped their ass with it, and by one of the founders.

This is the moment when the split politics, dirty ones from all sides, have penetrated into the very heart of OpenSource - into the Linux kernel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_YozYt8l-g

My first thought is that this was to make Linux palatable to western regulations, like how companies can't use Kaspersky anymore. Stupid if I'm right because it's not like the fsb is going to sneak spyware into Linux.

Edit: Linus commented on this and I was right: https://lemmy.world/comment/13034386

This is such an odd thing to do... I really cannot see the benefits for the project doing this. Maybe those maintainers were payed for their work and sanctions prohibit paying them or something?

I was wondering what's up with the comments but then I realized the main feed sent me to .ml.

While this is completely appalling, I cannot say I am shocked considering what Linus posts on some platforms and in some conversations. Really not surprising.

Don't take this justification seriously for a second. This is the check coming due for a community with leadership still beholden to western political hegemony, the intellectual appratus that decides who gets educated and what is published, etc etc. Getting a bit offtopic. View this in the same context as CERN kicking out Russians. Mask is coming off of science, democracy, freedom of speech and all that nonsense made up to spruce up the myth of civilization versus barbarity.

Greg sent out the patch but won't respond to mail list questions. Sad to see Linux leadership bend the knee

LMFO I was on the reddit thread reading this post and coudn't believe my eyes reading the comments. We're living truly revelation times. Like you said this is a long due wakeup call for the rest of the "uncivilized" world.

Actually I'm interested how it looks legally ( it somebody cares about it at all ). Whether the Russian contributors could ask to revert their changes as they most likely never signed the contract to transfer their code copyrights. For sure it will have a big impact on foss because if you have at least one American and Russian contributors, you may get in the biggest shitshow. Additionally if I was considering now to become a contributors, I'd be wondering if it's worthy at all to work for free and then to be banned no thanks for whole free work years

Hey, Torvalds! 🖕

NVIDIA banned Russia. What a stupid trick. Why block? As if anyone would be left without a driver.

Those nasty Russians might reveal or remove some of our back doors.

Good

Admittance of 'all eyes on code' being bullshit.

But Torvalds is from Soviet Finland [SF]

How to piss off the tankies 101