This developer worked for Baikal Electronics (from the Google snippet of his GitHub page, and earlier emails from him to the Linux kernel lists — showing his work was for that company).
That company received very significant subsidy from the Russian state. They produced CPUs for the Russian military.
This is a nice (and sad) goodbye email from Serge(y). It's moving to see all this time and work, what it meant to the person, and also to imagine what the contributions made mean to so many people who use the software. :`(
The situation is sad for individual contributors indeed. The overall backdrop does seem in line with sanctions requirements for ITAR, OFAC etc.
I mean, for me (as well as him, obviously) it is a matter of "how" rather than "what". It is understandable, that what for some government officials is political reasons, for Linux end up being legal reasons, so no matter how ugly it is, it is not surprising at all that it came down to banning somebody who works for a sanctioned organization. It also doesn't matter that it makes no sense whatsoever (after all, you don't have to show your documents applying to the Linux mailing list), since most adult people get the fact that there's no justice in life.
But it is one thing when it's "sorry man, nothing I can do" (as in his private conversations with senior maintenaners), and other thing entirely, when for all your good work you are being dealt with like that, no heads-up, no good-bye, instead you get these things Linus has said today. Like, seriously, it doesn't even matter if Linus hates Russians and truly personally thinks this is desirable to get rid of these maintainers, it is just a matter of human decency to not make it any more than it has to be against individual person that basically worked for you (for free). And even if you don't have any human decency, it still just would be smarter to play it more neutral. So, yeah, it was really even surprisingly ugly.
That’s sad, too. Sounds like you got caught up in this, nothing that’s your fault, as well. I’m sorry to hear it.
I agree the how should have been way better implemented. For the human enterprises that they are it certainly seems like insufficient consideration is often paid to that.
Better to have difficult conversations than pretend it will be okay and everyone will be fine. Sometimes people are just saving themselves by avoiding that. Unfortunately to the detriment of others!
I wonder if we'll see persistent Russian and Chinese forks of the Linux kernel to address this problem? Large parts of the kernel are written by Russian and Chinese people, and the US's sanctions regime against the PRC is nearly as aggressive as that against Russia. The GPL guarantees they can still merge in code from Linus, as long as he doesn't intentionally make it incompatible, and probably a lot of contributors will want to get their code into Linus's tree and also the Russian and/or Chinese tree, which could lead to pushback on deliberate compatibility breakage.
I was just looking at the Ubuntu work on the OEM kernel release. Apparently it is maintained by someone from China. It will be a bummer if that work stops.
It seems like a pretty lame rug sweep attempt. I understand that the moderation burden of these kind of threads is high and not every moderation action needs to be public. But for something of this significance it is disappointing that there hasn't even been any communication ( that I have seen) and imo is not in the spirit of hackernews.
Users flag stuff. There are lots of topics that tend not to have sane discussions (or simply don't fit HN) and people regularly flag these without any need for 'lame rug sweep attempts'. But if you're concerned about that you can always email the mods and ask.
It's interesting to note that Linux Foundation is not even mentioned anywhere in the discussions. It is all Linus Torvalds for people apparently. Linux Foundation and their corporate lawyers should be the ones who recommended this right?
Moreover, I am interested if this effects FreeBSD which is not run by corporates like Linux Foundation but is still US. And what about OpenBSD which is Canadian?
To be fair, I would personally welcome for these Foundations to move to more neutral countries. RISC V foundation moved to Switzerland because of the shenanigans concerning China.
I would trust the Swiss government more to keep the spirit of Open Source/Free Software up than the US one.
Because the code is thought still owned by the devs, I do not know how much difference that would make.
This is pretty sad to see, but this post was full of a lot of acronyms that might only make sense to people active in this space, so it was a bit difficult to read. Among others, what are NTB and DW here?
Readit News
That company received very significant subsidy from the Russian state. They produced CPUs for the Russian military.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baikal_CPU
https://ge.usembassy.gov/targeting-russias-senior-officials-...
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[flagged] Getting Called "Paid Actor" by Linus Torvalds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41929585 - Oct 23 2024 (24 comments)
[PATCH] MAINTAINERS: Remove some entries due to various compliance requirements. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41923749 - Oct 23 2024 (1 comment)
Re: [PATCH] Revert "MAINTAINERS: Remove some entries due to compliance" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41928532 - Oct 23 2024 (3 comments)
Linus Torvalds comments on the Russian Linux maintainers being delisted - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41927838 - Oct 23 2024 (35 comments)
The situation is sad for individual contributors indeed. The overall backdrop does seem in line with sanctions requirements for ITAR, OFAC etc.
But it is one thing when it's "sorry man, nothing I can do" (as in his private conversations with senior maintenaners), and other thing entirely, when for all your good work you are being dealt with like that, no heads-up, no good-bye, instead you get these things Linus has said today. Like, seriously, it doesn't even matter if Linus hates Russians and truly personally thinks this is desirable to get rid of these maintainers, it is just a matter of human decency to not make it any more than it has to be against individual person that basically worked for you (for free). And even if you don't have any human decency, it still just would be smarter to play it more neutral. So, yeah, it was really even surprisingly ugly.
I agree the how should have been way better implemented. For the human enterprises that they are it certainly seems like insufficient consideration is often paid to that.
Better to have difficult conversations than pretend it will be okay and everyone will be fine. Sometimes people are just saving themselves by avoiding that. Unfortunately to the detriment of others!
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Moreover, I am interested if this effects FreeBSD which is not run by corporates like Linux Foundation but is still US. And what about OpenBSD which is Canadian?
Because the code is thought still owned by the devs, I do not know how much difference that would make.
DW = DesignWare