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.
Wouldn’t that stop nearly every country from being able to contribute?
Sounds like a convoluted way of saying to just let the Russians off, veiled as some over the top “consistency” argument.
Maybe let’s do that tho, and just start with Russia 😆
Way to purposefully misread it.
The whole issue is that the Russians work for companies with sanctions against them.
So, treat all companies involved in war the same way, and you’ll never run into this hypocritical issue again.
There’s plenty of companies (like Valve) who don’t directly produce weapons of war or have contracts with their governments for war-services who contribute to Linux that could still do so, and plenty of individuals who don’t work for military and military adjacent companies to contribute.
Acting like removing people who work at companies that contribute to wars will mean no one can contribute is obviously a grossly exaggerated misinterpretation.
That’s not completely unreasonable tbh, but I still think the current sanctions are fair if not perfect.
I didn’t purposely misread, this part was just a bit unclear:
If you work for ANY company in ANY country that produces weapons for war
Funnily enough, the steam deck has been used during the conflict to control remote weapons. So they could be implicated in this if you go far enough
