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.

  • TheOubliette
    23·
    30 days ago

    Where is that a excuse? I was pointing out that it’s not a petty dispute, russia is trying to wipe out Ukraine…the fuck.

    You just repeated the excuse. Right there, lol. And Russia has caused far less damage to Ukraine and its people than the US has to its targets. You are simply inconsistent and don’t believe your own logic. Your true motivations are elsewhere.

    Ooo oo, I know this one…is it…whataboutism again for $400 alex?

    Oh, am I not allowed to point out your inconsistency because you have a term for doing that?

    Yea…no it’s not, russia is doing that on their own.

    This post is about a thread where the people who removed Russians from the list did so under pressure by the US federal government are: their sanctions policies. It is literally exactly what I said and not at all what you said.

    Please do your best to speak the truth.

    Ok. Reality, russia is a fucked up authoritarian state that willfully sends it’s people to rape, murder and commit war crimes, like it got its war plans from the viking era. How’s that for some reality. Champ.

    It’s you distracting yourself through repetition because you cannot honestly respond to my points. So it is the opposite of facing reality, it is evasiveness.

    Yea…yea it is.

    Nope

    Sweet…are we getting somewhere…

    No it is just trivially the case.

    Ahhh nope apparently not…still humping about the USA.

    Because they did the thing that you agree deserves kicking out their citizens from the maintainer list. And they did it more.

    Hahahhaha holy fuck…o wait you’re a tankie…

    Are you laughing at the mass civilian bombings or the starvation of children?

    And a russian apologist…man this is just hilarious…you really are following the .ml tankie guidelines.

    It seems you are afraid of basic facts that contradict your beliefs.

    Lol for all the west’s faults, we’re still not even half as murderous as the authoritarian dictatorships you love.

    The West’s civilian death count is orders of magnitude higher than the RF invading UA.

    Yea no…

    You did, accidentally.

    Because it’s easier to just use sanctions as the reason. The idea that a authoritarian state wouldn’t force their devs to create backdoors for their state is hilariously naive, but you won’t see it that way because you’re a brainwashed tankie.

    Ah yes, the thing you just made up that hasn’t happened and calls every developer in the country “their devs” is surely more correct than decades of code review practices and individual track records.

    Re: brainwashing, you will notice that I am not the one running away from inconvenient facts at every turn. I am not afraid of such things, but they are clearly a threat to your way of thinking.

    Yea no shit? Who said they are?

    I quoted what I was responding to and that sentiment permeates it.