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.
byeeeeeeee
What pisses me off the most about NAFOids is the absolute and constant pettiness.
The brutal cognitive dissonance you manage to encapsulated in this comment is impressive.
You’re welcome to fork Linux at any time 👋 see ya!
Later in that thread:
Please accept all of our apologies for the way this was handled. A summary of the legal advice the kernel is operating under is
If your company is on the U.S. OFAC SDN lists, subject to an OFAC sanctions program, or owned/controlled by a company on the list, our ability to collaborate with you will be subject to restrictions, and you cannot be in the MAINTAINERS file.
Anyone who wishes to can query the list here: https://sanctionssearch.ofac.treas.gov/
But folks who work for US companies building weapons for Israel are totes okay?
It’s honestly fucking wild that an internationally developed open source project has to play by the US government’s rules when the US government is out here helping commit genocide right the fuck now.
Like, look in the fucking mirror on this why don’t you.
Maybe the better rule is that if you work for a company that produces weaponry for war you shouldn’t be allowed to contribute, period.
You may be amazed to learn that there aren’t many international sanctions against the USA at this time, but I imagine you could probably get into legal trouble for collaborating with Americans if you’re in, I don’t know, North Korea maybe.
You may be amazed to learn that the reason there aren’t many international sanctions against the USA at this time is not because the USA is a beacon of peace, freedom, democracy, and national sovereignty. Because the US is very much not that.
It’s crazy how the US Treasury isn’t sanctioning companies for working on US government approved contracts. /s
Wow, I didn’t know that being a Linux/open source contributor meant you don’t have to follow your country’s laws.
It’s developed internationally but devs still reside somewhere and have to abide by the rules at that place. Linux in this case being represented by an US entity means they have to follow the gov’s sanctions. If you want more or less of those, that’s where (the government) you act.
This isn’t about them being kicked out, this is about the fact we don’t know the process that resulted in this. Was this a decision Linus made after a night coding and thinking about the world? Was the foundation ordered to do it?
It lacks transparency into the process even if the outcome is fine and the way it was done doesn’t feel transparent, even if it makes sense not to include Russian coders in the project.
Maybe the better rule is that if you work for a company that produces weaponry for war you shouldn’t be allowed to contribute, period.
This is something I can actually get behind on.
But, you see, there is just one teeency weeency tiny problem with that. They spend trucks of cash on whatever they deem will give them what they want, including funding organizations that they profit from.
But folks who work for US companies building weapons for Israel are totes okay?
Who here said this?
Which is exactly what anyone who wasn’t wanting to just snort some concentrated outrage knew was the case.
And you can argue as to if OFAC list should apply to things like this or not, but the problem is that the enforcement options for OFAC violations include ‘stomp you into the ground until you’re powder’, most people are just going to comply.
Also from that thread.
Again, we’re really sorry it’s come to this, but all of the Linux infrastructure and a lot of its maintainers are in the US and we can’t ignore the requirements of US law. We are hoping that this action alone will be sufficient to satisfy the US Treasury department in charge of sanctions and we won’t also have to remove any existing patches.
US law CAN’T apply on foreign ground, period. Nothing can. Just because they can bully their way around that, doesn’t mean they are right.
And it should be only fair that Israeli maintainers be removed as well.
They should also rethink their infrastructure policy and whether they still want it on US soil.
This is all wishful thinking, I know, but this just goes to show you how they have absolutely no backbone whatsoever. As if anybody is gonna touch the Linux kernel and jeopardize the safety of millions of systems. We all know that is never going to happen, but they still bent over for the US… so typical… just goes to show you how little backbone everyone has, including Linus.
Oh, and don’t get me started on the Russia/Finland history comment…
If the company is in the USA they can restrict who you colloborate with. They also can control what you export as a oftware product under ITAR/EAR rules. It is why when some encryotion work had to be done the devs crossed the border into Canada to work on development, because under USA law encryption code is a controlled export product even if opensource
Does everyone here just not understand how international sanctions work?
As someone with a STEM degree in a STEM field, I’m consistently bummed out by how clearly silo’d my colleagues’ educations were. It is so plainly obvious as soon as you try to have a conversation with them about anything outside of their area of expertise.
And don’t bother trying to correct or teach them anything, because in their minds, they’re smarter than you, and you have nothing worthwhile to teach them.
This thread is full of software engineers with just no concept of how society functions, or even a basic understanding of the geopolitical context of any of this.
Israel is not against the US at this point. Russia and the US are in a war with Ukraine being the middle man. Look at what the US did to Hauwei sanctioned it and forbid any us company from doing business with it. Basically none of the world could use the phones. All the tech the world is using is American so they get to say what any country can do.
Oh hey, a reasonable comment here that actually has a decent score… These comments are wild. But given the recent… I’ll just say, conspicuously pro-Russian, turn this site seems to have taken in the run up to the election, it’s not exactly a surprise.
I’m shocked I didn’t get downvoted to shit myself.
It’s just that it was VERY clearly either sanctions or a NSL, since the Linux Foundation is in the US and the two things that result in a public entity like that making silent, un-explained changes are, well, sanctions and NSLs and you don’t say shit because your lawyer told you not to.
I don’t necessarily agree that tossing contributors off an open-source project is in the spirit of the OFAC list, but the problem almost certainly is that they’re employed by some giant tech company in Russia.
And, in Russia, like in the US, and Israel, and China, and anywhere else you care to mention, tech companies are almost always involved in military supply chains, since shit don’t work without computers at this point.
Which leads to a cycle of being unable to work with Weapons, Inc. and someone works for Weapons, Inc. so now that person can’t be worked with either and so your choices are… comply with the OFAC list, or take a stupid amount of legal risk up to and including angry people with guns showing up to talk to you.
We really don’t know the whole story and immediately jumping to “Imperialists bad!” is how certain chunks of Lemmy roll these days.
I think they’d be much happier if they all moved to North Korea and helped achieve the goal of Juche by becoming dirt farmers.
Smart dude. He knows exactly why. To pretend that he doesn’t is a sham. This whole “I don’t know whyyyyyy” face he’s put on is an absolute facade.
“Russian Sanctions” due to Russia invading a peaceful nation and killing Ukrainians is not a race of people.
Russia is a country. Not a race.
Individual random people are not mentioned in the sanctions and have little to nothing to do with the state, just like the US. The foundation kicking out US maintainers during the Iraq war when the US was indiscriminately killing over a million Iraqi civilians would have been equally ridiculous.
So no, they don’t and shouldn’t have assumed this is due to sanctions. It’s free software they volunteering to help. There is no profit motive. They are not state actors. And most importantly to you,not all Russians are bad evil whatever slur you want to call them, you racist.
What definition of race are you going by?
Oxford dictionary: “a group of people who share the same language, history, culture, etc.”
Merrian Webster dictionary: "any one of the groups that humans are often divided into based on physical traits regarded as common among people of shared ancestry
Also: a group of people sharing a common cultural, geographical, linguistic, or religious origin or background"
Are you really still using debunked race science concepts in 2024?
Just because you group people based on a different construct does not mean you aren’t racist. What’s next, islamophobia is okay too?
a peaceful nation
Let’s not go overboard.
- BBC, 2014: Ukraine underplays role of far right in conflict
- Human Rights Watch, 2014: Ukraine: Unguided Rockets Killing Civilians
- The Hill, 2017: The reality of neo-Nazis in Ukraine is far from Kremlin propaganda
- The Guardian, 2017: ‘I want to bring up a warrior’: Ukraine’s far-right children’s camp – video
- WaPo, 2018: The war in Ukraine is more devastating than you know
- Reuters, 2018: Ukraine’s neo-Nazi problem
- The Nation, 2019: Neo-Nazis and the Far Right Are On the March in Ukraine
- openDemocracy, 2019: Why Ukraine’s new language law will have long-term consequences
- Al Jazeera, 2022: Why did Ukraine suspend 11 ‘pro-Russia’ parties?
- Jacobin, 2022: A US-Backed, Far Right–Led Revolution in Ukraine Helped Bring Us to the Brink of War
- NYT, 2024: U.N. Court to Rule on Whether Ukraine Committed Genocide
Of course, if you’re living in Russia, it’s dangerous to state anything other than support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
That doesn’t mean it isn’t cringeworthy to watch someone awkwardly dance around it, trying to ignore it while complaining about (checks notes) losing a bit of reputation over an unnecessary war that their country started and which literally cost thousands of lives.
Any Russian who stands up against that is incredibly brave. The others, just different levels of sad. Non-Russians who support Putin are the worst.
I understand why you’d want FOSS to not care abot borders, wars and politics and that is noble. But to call this comment racism, comes across as a veiled show of support for Putin. As if critiquing his invasion is a racist act that hurts the Russian people. Putins invasion is hurting the Russian people. Not this comment.
I bet you wouldn’t have the same response if Israeli maintainers are being removed.
It sucks if well meaning people are caught up in this, but it also sucks if you’re living in the aggressor state of an ongoing war.
So shouldn’t this also include the US and the many countries (most of Western Europe, plus others) involved in coalitions bombing the middle east and elsewhere?
These people allegedly work for companies that work for the Russian war machine. They will regain privileges if they don’t work for them. So if they find a moral job, they’ll be treated morally.
