Banned for being linked to Russian state, or for being Russian? Lol those are very very different
So many bad-faith arguments being made about this.
Independent of any arguments about who asked for this to happen and why: A free software project always has the right to choose which contributors it trusts and which it doesn’t. I’ve seen no evidence that these people are banned from submitting patches due to their nationality. They’ve been remove from a particular role in the project due to political reasons. An organization is an inherently political entity.
Remember when codes of conduct destroyed all of free software and nothing ever got built again? Me neither. It’s the same thing.
Need to get people to bump this higher up. Great take.
Russia is welcome to fork the kernel
The discussion around this has been physically painful to read. From what I gather, the delisted maintainers are people on sanction lists, i.e. somehow connected to the Russian state, and they have been given the opportunity to prove their innocence by providing some (admittedly unspecified) documents to Linus and the Linux Foundation.
Judging by Linus’s updated comment in that article there are legal concerns involved, as the Linux Foundation is a US-based organization. Though even if they weren’t, it is the morally correct thing to do to give Russian state actors the boot.
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.
Though even if they weren’t, it is the morally correct thing to do to give Russian state actors the boot.
Meanwhile Linus is fine with supporting USA DOD and making a profit from it. Funny how morality changes when you introduce other interests… It’s a purely business move and has nothing to do with ethics.
Not only that, he’s likely using the whole “I’m Finnish” thing as an excuse. According to Wikipedia at least, he’s now an American citizen living in -of all places, Silicon Valley.
I mean, it’s not like he’s going to say “I’ve got a few mil in redhat stocks, and they signed a new $800+ mil deal with the DoD 2 months ago, so we’ve got to clean house”
