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.
👏
o7
I hope that this will cause Russia and aligned countries to switch and invest into one of BSD variants. Probably won’t happen, but there is hope.
Wait linux community is removing maintainters because of their nationality???!!
It’s not about nationality. Here are the facts:
- LF is USA based (headquarters in California), as such they’re subject to USA law
- USA imposed sanctions on companies that are directly involved in supplying Russia with weapons.
- To have business, including receiving help, from those companies would open LF to legal repercussions in the country where they’re based.
- Baikal Electronic JSC is on the sanctioned list.
- Serge Sermin public GitHub profile listed Baikal as their employer
Therefore to not remove Serge from the maintainers would open LF to legal repercussions.
You might not agree with what was done, I certainly don’t, but I understand it.
How things is done 30 years ago https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy#Criminal_investigation
And this by Ken Thompson 40 years ago https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backdoor_(computing)#Compiler_backdoors
Let’s just say this properly ok so that 70 percent of the commenters here might better understand.
Association with some of the people previously on the kernel maintainers list was putting the Linux kernel at risk. The risk was that European, American, and other users may be prohibited from using it. The risk was that entities such as the Linux Foundation could be held in contempt of sanctions and sanctioned themselves. That could mean financial damage or even a full stop to operations.
If the kernel were sanctioned, every entity, individual or company, could be put at risk.
Association with sanctioned individuals put every other maintainer at risk. Being listed together in the maintainers file put many innocent people in extreme jeopardy.
So, let’s say this properly ok…
Some of the maintainers were removed to defend the Linux kernel and the many, many entities ( individual and corporate ) that use it. They were removed to protect the other maintainers and the people and companies that they associate with.
The Linux Foundation, being American, may have been particularly at risk. But “moving” the kernel does nothing. The contributors and maintainers are still wherever they are. Linux users are equally economically dependent on the US and Europe regardless. The issue are the international sanctions. My country has issued them too ( neither American or European ). And blaming the counties that issued the sanctions, instead of blaming Russia, is a very interesting morale position to take ( not getting into that here ).
My first reaction was to have a problem with how this was done. However, once you acknowledge the association, any interaction, collaboration, or communication becomes even more problematic as you KNOW that you are working with sanctioned individuals. So, doing it simply and succinctly was probably best.
Not nationality but alleged involvement with sanctioned organizations. There are plenty of Russian names on maintainers list remaining.
I still don’t think something so important should be beholden to the whims of one company (Linux Foundation) or their country’s laws (USA).
I would strongly prefer to use an operating system that didn’t have this problem. Do any even exist?
That’s the beauty about open source: it isn’t beholden to the whims of anyone. If disagree with the Linux Foundation, you’re free to make your own independent fork. Others that agree with you can then start contributing to the fork. And this isn’t a purely theoretical scenario as it has happend with other open source projects before.
Not just the USA. Certainly at least the EU as well. I belong to neither.
Not sure what better world you want where we are not “beholden” to laws though.
The GPL is certainly “beholden” to laws as well, including a total lack of developer freedom which I personally disagree with.
For precisely when we disagree, there have to be laws.
It’s a good thing that no one is beholden to anyone then. Which is the entire point of free software.
I still don’t think something so important should be beholden to the whims of one company (Linux Foundation) or their country’s laws (USA).
Exactly my thoughts.
I would strongly prefer to use an operating system that didn’t have this problem. Do any even exist?
I was contemplating using FreeBSD, but then I found about the kernel switch to forbid Russian or Chinese usernames and… well, that’s not an option as well IMO.
Honestly must be incredibly stressful managing a project like the Linux kernel. Governments constantly wanting changes made for their own purposes, companies leeching off the work of volunteers, neck beards losing their minds over some change they don’t like.
I don’t envy them at all. This sort of change was inevitability going to piss people off - it could have been handled better but I think it was going to be lose/lose no matter which way it was done.
I personally think this is a cop out. Obviously people would have been outraged either way, but personally my only issue is about how it was done. The whole point of the FOSS community is openness and transparency. The senior maintainers of arguably the most important FOSS project trying to operate secretively on something like this has shattered my trust in them, as well as many others.
It’s pretty hard to be open and transparent when 2 men with guns and black suits are sitting at your kitchen table.
We don’t know if that happened, but given the speed this happened and the us being the us…
If it breaks that they had a long runway of knowing this had to happen, then sure bring out the pitchforks, but imo we should default to this happening under heavy pressure to act immediately.
So you realize they have no choice and couldn’t have done any differently but you’re still irrationally upset about it so you decided to become the tone police?
I don’t think it’s irrational to have wanted them to be transparent about it, but you do you I guess.
My main concern with this happening is how much secret control the US government has over top Linux maintainers. Many commenters say that Linus couldn’t refuse the request from the government because he lives in the US and Linux Foundation is in the US. So what other requests from the government known to put backdoors into software they couldn’t refuse in the past or won’t be able to refuse in the future?
I, too, do not want to be deleted out of existence by the US government/military and so i, too, comply with sanctions.
We have reason to believe Linus and the kernel team are not filling the kernel with government back doors (for the thing, there’s a high chance someone notices and makes it public that such code was put into the kernel by one of them). Linus has talked about refusing to do this in the past. However, it’s no surprise they’re not willing to risk the whole project for a handful of people working for Russian weapons manufacturers.
Yes, this is exactly my same thoughts.
This is terrifying.
I don’t like what the Russian government is doing and Putin is cruel and evil, albeit intelligent (which makes him even more terrible).
That being said, in the US, government agencies can order a company to do certain things, put in certain code, or whatever and then issue a gag order as part of that preventing disclosure. And although there’s a limit to how much that can screw over open-source software users, we do not know what exploits nation-states have, we don’t know what backdoors are in different chipsets or closed-source firmware.
If a developer writing open source code can be blacklisted so easily without transparency into the process, it suggests the company is being ordered to do certain things and not disclose them by the US government, which is a government that still engages in torture.
Notice how they are not coming out and saying “We were not ordered to do this by any government agency.”
Could the foundation be forced to elevate a developer with government ties who then is able to “accidentally” put in an extremely hard to detect exploit into linux that won’t be detected at first and only patched later?
I really wish companies associated with linux were not in a country that lacked transparency with government regulations and in which gag orders were not possible.
The senior maintainers of arguably the most important FOSS project trying to operate secretively on something like this has shattered my trust in them, as well as many others.
Basically, my stand on this.
And that it was dismissed like it was “no big deal” by Linus and some of the other senior maintainers.
But seriously, Linus’s comment regarding this was… just… I have no words… he basically put every Russian in the same basket, called them trolls and added a racist comment on top of that, I mean… yeah, I lost all respect for him. At least his previous fits were about code and only if someone fucked up something, this is completely different.
But seriously, Linus’s comment regarding this was… just… I have no words… he basically put every Russian in the same basket, called them trolls
There are a huge number of online Russian trolls. That part of his response was not hyperbolic. They do have troll factories there to influence public opinion.
The problem is this still leads to questions about transparency about the project in general and how this decision was made and whether it was made by those involved in the project or was an order from the US government.
Exactly, that’s also my view. In Serge’s thread somebody else said Linus used to be his role model but now he is questioning his own beliefs. Sums up my feelings perfectly.
It sucks so bad, Linus really screwed up big time, and GKH dropped the ball as well. What kind of a hellish timeline is this?
