linux: Goodbye from a Linux community volunteer
lore.kernel.org

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.

  • schizo@forum.uncomfortable.businessEnglish
    10211·
    1 day ago

    Which is exactly what anyone who wasn’t wanting to just snort some concentrated outrage knew was the case.

    And you can argue as to if OFAC list should apply to things like this or not, but the problem is that the enforcement options for OFAC violations include ‘stomp you into the ground until you’re powder’, most people are just going to comply.

    • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      53·
      5 hours ago

      Oh hey, a reasonable comment here that actually has a decent score… These comments are wild. But given the recent… I’ll just say, conspicuously pro-Russian, turn this site seems to have taken in the run up to the election, it’s not exactly a surprise.

      • schizo@forum.uncomfortable.businessEnglish
        42·
        2 hours ago

        I’m shocked I didn’t get downvoted to shit myself.

        It’s just that it was VERY clearly either sanctions or a NSL, since the Linux Foundation is in the US and the two things that result in a public entity like that making silent, un-explained changes are, well, sanctions and NSLs and you don’t say shit because your lawyer told you not to.

        I don’t necessarily agree that tossing contributors off an open-source project is in the spirit of the OFAC list, but the problem almost certainly is that they’re employed by some giant tech company in Russia.

        And, in Russia, like in the US, and Israel, and China, and anywhere else you care to mention, tech companies are almost always involved in military supply chains, since shit don’t work without computers at this point.

        Which leads to a cycle of being unable to work with Weapons, Inc. and someone works for Weapons, Inc. so now that person can’t be worked with either and so your choices are… comply with the OFAC list, or take a stupid amount of legal risk up to and including angry people with guns showing up to talk to you.

        We really don’t know the whole story and immediately jumping to “Imperialists bad!” is how certain chunks of Lemmy roll these days.

        I think they’d be much happier if they all moved to North Korea and helped achieve the goal of Juche by becoming dirt farmers.

    • 0x4E4F@infosec.pubOPEnglish
      4027·
      22 hours ago

      Also from that thread.

      Again, we’re really sorry it’s come to this, but all of the Linux infrastructure and a lot of its maintainers are in the US and we can’t ignore the requirements of US law. We are hoping that this action alone will be sufficient to satisfy the US Treasury department in charge of sanctions and we won’t also have to remove any existing patches.

      US law CAN’T apply on foreign ground, period. Nothing can. Just because they can bully their way around that, doesn’t mean they are right.

      And it should be only fair that Israeli maintainers be removed as well.

      They should also rethink their infrastructure policy and whether they still want it on US soil.

      This is all wishful thinking, I know, but this just goes to show you how they have absolutely no backbone whatsoever. As if anybody is gonna touch the Linux kernel and jeopardize the safety of millions of systems. We all know that is never going to happen, but they still bent over for the US… so typical… just goes to show you how little backbone everyone has, including Linus.

      Oh, and don’t get me started on the Russia/Finland history comment…

      • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        121·
        3 hours ago

        Does everyone here just not understand how international sanctions work?

        As someone with a STEM degree in a STEM field, I’m consistently bummed out by how clearly silo’d my colleagues’ educations were. It is so plainly obvious as soon as you try to have a conversation with them about anything outside of their area of expertise.

        And don’t bother trying to correct or teach them anything, because in their minds, they’re smarter than you, and you have nothing worthwhile to teach them.

        This thread is full of software engineers with just no concept of how society functions, or even a basic understanding of the geopolitical context of any of this.

      • BCsven@lemmy.ca
        6·
        7 hours ago

        If the company is in the USA they can restrict who you colloborate with. They also can control what you export as a oftware product under ITAR/EAR rules. It is why when some encryotion work had to be done the devs crossed the border into Canada to work on development, because under USA law encryption code is a controlled export product even if opensource