This isn't the end of Linux but it may be the beginning of the end. Right now alarm bells are screaming in China, Russia, India, across the global south about this. They've seen the decades of US sanctions, often arbitrary and other punitive measures including cultural campaigns of exclusion and punishment (remember "freedom fries" after 9/11 because the French wouldn't go along with US adventures in Iraq?) now reaching a fever-pitch. All pretensions of the US to stand for freedom and individual liberty and such have been pushed aside, shoved away by these acts and the blatant hypocrisy of their support of the genocidal zionist state which even now broadens the war of aggression and genocide against Palestinians and Lebanese with full US support and diplomatic cover at the UN.

They see that all that lofty talk from the US was after all a lie. A large number of lies.

Where do we go from here? I fear fragmentation and partition of the world may be inevitable, a new cold war, the internet, software, everything being divided by series of hard and not so hard walls and barriers impeding cooperation, business, trade, cultural exchange, and people to people relations and discussions at an organic grassroots level.

Those in the west will see the freedoms increasingly curtailed, lofty language rolled back behind a large series of ever more expansive "but..." clauses, corporatization of the internet will increase, surveillance, control all justified by the waved wand of hysteria over Russia, China, Iran, muslims, whoever necessitating giving up your privacy, your rights, your freedoms, and of course any right for a dissenting opinion against whoever the current US president is and their administration.

National security in the 90s was used to outlaw export of encryption, to embargo the idea of a secure internet, to push for backdoor chips via the clipper chip in all personal computers. Now it and the same kind of foreign boogeymen are being used to finish that task that they failed at and we are letting them because of jingoism.

Linux leadership: we are running dogs for American empire and will eagerly implement all chauvinisy policies in our "international" open source project. Sure we can insult you and lie and make bigoted comments.

Are you all stoked for major forks? Because this is how you get major forks. Presimably they will start as patches on upstream, but decoupling would be an eventuality.

Yeah it's cutting off the nose to spite the face. Stupid move by the kernel admins. If you're gonna start banning people from contributitg because of shut their government does, then the entire US and Israeli population of Linux devs should be dropped.

This is all very sad.

Just make a new kernel or something 🤷

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

UPDATE: When asked whether Linus Torvalds was under any sort of NDA around this, he responded:

"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."

but the key words are "sanctions", "sorry", "nothing I can do"

It seems like it has more to do with the us goverment, still, this is some bs level i havent seen in a while.

Not only they were banned, they removed them from the credits! this is bs.

Two comments about this:

• It is my firm belief that 99% of the population of any country ruled by a dictator are the primary victims of that dictator, don't condone what their rulers do, have done nothing wrong and are just trying to be good people in unfavorable circumstances.

  The Russians are no different and it isn't fair to impose on Russian individuals of obvious good will the treatment governments apply to the Russian government, because the Russian government and the Russian people are two very different things.

• Linus said in this interview:

  I'm Finnish. Did you think I'd be supporting Russian aggression?

  and here I'm telling you this: Linus acts like a dipshit.

  I know the Finns very, VERY well, and while they're generally great people, when it comes to Russia and Russians, they have epidermic reactions of totally unreasonable proportions.

  I understand where they're coming from and why they react like that, but Russia is to the Finnish people what peanuts are to someone with a peanut allergy: the reaction is totally disproportionate and with zero nuances.

  Don't ever try to argue with a Finn that a Russian person can be good, and that Putin is also their enemy: the Finn will shut down and stop talking to you - meaning, in their culture, that you can politely go fuck yourself.

  And that's what we're witnessing here with Linus: however many years he's lived in California, he still hasn't shed that part of his upbringing, and quite frankly, shame on him.