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.
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?
Yes, if the issue was a moral one. This issue, however, is a legal one.
Then it isn’t about living in an aggressor state, is it?
It is but doesn’t mean it has to apply to every country equally. This isn’t a movie everything isn’t black and white. We had a nice run where everyone was working together or are last tolerating each other, it was peaceful. But the US Russia and China are drifting further apart and becoming less reliant on each other, which sadly means it’s not going to be as peaceful going forward. Also they are not going to tolerate each other as much China Russia already have their versions of Linux distorts just imagine there might be more differences in the future.
At which point was it “peaceful”? The US invaded 3 countries around then and bombed and couped many more. Millions were killed.
Yes this will eventually lead to forks due to the US forcing decoupling. It is a highly aggressive terrorist state.
Yeah probably… But that’s a separate discussion isn’t it?
How is it a separate discussion?
Because this isn’t a post about the results of sanctions against the US?
No it isn’t. Read the comment I replied to.
Whataboutism isn’t a very convincing argument.
And hypocrisy is even worse.
It is if you’re biased.
I’m not biased and I’m not picking a side, but there is a lot of whataboutism is this thread and I stand by my stance that it is a weak argument and a logical fallacy.
US and EU double standards is what this whataboutism is all about. I can state this for a fact, since my country is also in this pickle because of EU double standards. And it is constructive if you have a valid reason to raise the issue. There is a valid reason to raise this issue.
Can you use your own words to demonstrate why my argument isn’t convincing? What’s not convincing is throwing around the word “whataboutism” and thinking that’s an argument.
Yeah must suck to live in Israel.
Not as much as living in Palestine or Ukraine.
I don’t want to defend Israel, but their current war is a defensive one, no?
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.
There have been more people removed than just the ones with .ru.
The commit also reads this:
Remove some entries due to various compliance requirements. They can come back in the future if sufficient documentation is provided.