Perhaps one of the more surprising changes in the 6.12-rc4 development kernel was the removal of several entries from the kernel’s MAINTAINERS file. The patch performing the removal was sent (by Greg Kroah-Hartman) only to the patches@lists.linux.dev mailing list; the change was included in a char-misc drivers pull request with no particular mention.
The explanation for the removal is simply ““various compliance requirements””. Given that the developers involved all appear to be of Russian origin, it is not too hard to imagine what sort of compliance is involved here. There has, however, been no public posting of the policy that required the removal of these entries.
An early comment likely pins down the prevailing institutional pressures leading to this decision
What’s the deal with an international project adhering to what is obviously a decision of the US government?
Hint: The Linux Foundation (which notably employs Greg KH and Torvalds, and provides a lot of the legal and other infrastructure for this “international project”) is based in the US, and therefore has to follow US laws.
This is pretty fucked up. Like, we might see the kernel forked in the coming months/years.
See also: Phoronix: Linus Torvalds Comments On The Russian Linux Maintainers Being Delisted
In practice it means that some maintainers to the Linux kernel have been removed. It’s a fucked up thing to do but in and of itself would likely not achieve any particular effect either way. Just a worrying direction for the official kernel to go down.
What is a maintaner?
They’re the people who take the code from thousands of developers, check it for errors, make sure there are no regressions, coordinate the code with the patches from other maintainers from further up and down the tree, and finally herd the patches toward the mainline, as well as manage backports.
It’s essentially another term for developer, but a developer which maintains/administrates a project and analyzes, coordinates, and governs the patches (changes to code) that are applied to a project, especially a large one like Linux, Rust, Git, etc. where multiple maintainers are needed.
https://docs.kernel.org/maintainer/feature-and-driver-maintainers.html
So, banning maintainers who are russian means what in the long term? What were they contributing before?
It sets a precedent of banning maintainers and other contributors from nations in the Global South and nations declared enemies of NATO. This goes against open source philosophy, and this will lead to China and other nations needing to develop their own sovereign forks or kernels from scratch.
It’s similar to the US working to ban RISC-V to stop China from using an open source instruction set to become more technologically sovereign. Restricting open source software from NATO’s enemies is essentially NATO shooting themselves in the foot in the long term. NATO is sanctioning an enemy, so the enemy is incentivized to build alternatives to tech they lost (which can be forked easily), and then the alternatives become popular and challenge NATO’s tech, which is not competing where over 30% of manufacturing industry exists, which leads to NATO’s tech and industry crumbling as it cannot dominate the market like it was able to before and further accelerates the Empire’s decline.
This is a good comment on this thread that explains the long term consequences more comprehensively than what I did: https://hexbear.net/comment/5541448
Thank you I’ll check that out.
This is the list of contributors that got removed according to a popular russian Linux web community.
So they’re no longer allowed to do what in regards to these systems? Do they not have access anymore to the things they built? Or is it that now there’s a russian “branch” of these and a not russian “branch” that they both have access to?
I’m literally in IT and I don’t know this shit lol, such a dummy
Apparently they have just been removed from the MAINTAINERS file for now but it is not yet known if this will have any implications for their ability to send patches for inclusion in the kernel. If the latter proves to be the case, some of the drivers might end up unmaintained until another person gains enough trust to become a maintainer. This will surely affect support for the Russian BAIKAL processors, for example.
Apparently the removed contributors can return only if they provide some sort of “documentation” (not specified which though). They can still work on the kernel, but now they are not able to directly merge changes into the codebase, they can only send patches which may or may not be accepted. Or they could organise and create an independent Linux kernel fork which they would have to keep up to date by merging code from the upstream.
This much I understood from the news and comments.