As a Finnish person I wholeheartedly agree with Linus.
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.
How exactly is he turning his back on the GPL? Those Russian maintainers are still free to fork the kernel, make whatever changes they want, and release it. The GPL has never guaranteed that a maintainer has to take contributions from anyone. Open source could never function that way.
Yep, anyone who is celebrating this is shortsighted and letting their own nationalistic ideas and jingoism cloud their judgement.
There is a hot war going on and the US is using sanctions to isolate Russia from using western technology to continue their genocide. That goes a little beyond “nationalistic ideas”. Russia is being isolated for their actions and this was past due. It sucks for the Russian maintainers, but under the heading of “war is hell” this is a minor inconvenience.
The US is the most belligerent nation on earth, shall we ban american contributors? How about israeli?
Should their code be removed from the kernel?
The real question i haven’t seen answered is Who owns the kernel code. Torvalds owns the Linux™ but that’s to prevent others from buying it, but i was under the impression the source code is owned by all those who contribute to it and not whoever happens to be employing Torvalds at the time. Or is it a matter of where https://git.kernel.org/ happens to be hosted?
I’d suggest Codeberg but that’s in Germany, so maybe another forgejo instance hosted maybe in Switzerland.
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
IANAL, but I think the general answer is no. When someone contribute code to an open source project, although they aren’t giving up their copyright, they do grant the recipient (and the rest of the world, for that matter) a license to use their code. In case of Linux, this is the GNU Public License. Unless GPL has a section about license revocation that I am not aware of, you won’t be able to take your code back.
