Official statement regarding recent Greg' commit 6e90b675cf942e from Serge Semin
Hello Linux-kernel community,
I am sure you have already heard the news caused by the recent Greg' commit 6e90b675cf942e ("MAINTAINERS: Remove some entries due to various compliance requirements."). As you may have noticed the change concerned some of the Ru-related developers removal from the list of the official kernel maintainers, including me.
The community members rightly noted that the quite short commit log contained very vague terms with no explicit change justification. No matter how hard I tried to get more details about the reason, alas the senior maintainer I was discussing the matter with haven't given an explanation to what compliance requirements that was. I won't cite the exact emails text since it was a private messaging, but the key words are "sanctions", "sorry", "nothing I can do", "talk to your (company) lawyer"... I can't say for all the guys affected by the change, but my work for the community has been purely volunteer for more than a year now (and less than half of it had been payable before that). For that reason I have no any (company) lawyer to talk to, and honestly after the way the patch has been merged in I don't really want to now. Silently, behind everyone's back, bypassing the standard patch-review process, with no affected developers/subsystem notified - it's indeed the worse way to do what has been done. No gratitude, no credits to the developers for all these years of the devoted work for the community. No matter the reason of the situation but haven't we deserved more than that? Adding to the GREDITS file at least, no?..
I can't believe the kernel senior maintainers didn't consider that the patch wouldn't go unnoticed, and the situation might get out of control with unpredictable results for the community, if not straight away then in the middle or long term perspective. I am sure there have been plenty ways to solve the problem less harmfully, but they decided to take the easiest path. Alas what's done is done. A bifurcation point slightly initiated a year ago has just been fully implemented. The reason of the situation is obviously in the political ground which in this case surely shatters a basement the community has been built on in the first place. If so then God knows what might be next (who else might be sanctioned...), but the implemented move clearly sends a bad signal to the Linux community new comers, to the already working volunteers and hobbyists like me.
Thus even if it was still possible for me to send patches or perform some reviews, after what has been done my motivation to do that as a volunteer has simply vanished. (I might be doing a commercial upstreaming in future though). But before saying goodbye I'd like to express my gratitude to all the community members I have been lucky to work with during all these years.
Are they legally bound to follow any sanction list in their dealings? If so Linux foundation should consider move out of the US jurisdiction, because the santion load is just going to increase and more countries will be included.
If they are just doing this because of a political fad and partaking "the current thing" then they are just voluntarily digging their own and the linux foundation's grave.
Linus chose to move to the US as well to become a US citizen.
To be fair he never claimed to be an idealist.
Also he is anti Russian himself as he made clear in his first comment in the thread. So being forced to remove them is probably a bonus for him.
Where should they move to? Countries that aren't sanctioning Russia right now are likely to be... problematic? in other ways. But I am also pretty ignorant about which countries are on that list, and I would like to know more.
Maybe they need to become pirates on international water...
Not to mention more stupid shit, like not being able to visit the US if your wife is Russian, cuz.. you know, you might be a spy.
My 2 cents. Nobody is asking them to do anything... yet... and they probably never will, but... they're scared shitless and they would rather comply, even for things no one is asking of them yet and is dubious whether or not they're even covered by the sanctions, than show some backbone.