This is a nice (and sad) goodbye email from Serge(y). It's moving to see all this time and work, what it meant to the person, and also to imagine what the contributions made mean to so many people who use the software. :`(

The situation is sad for individual contributors indeed. The overall backdrop does seem in line with sanctions requirements for ITAR, OFAC etc.

I mean, for me (as well as him, obviously) it is a matter of "how" rather than "what". It is understandable, that what for some government officials is political reasons, for Linux end up being legal reasons, so no matter how ugly it is, it is not surprising at all that it came down to banning somebody who works for a sanctioned organization. It also doesn't matter that it makes no sense whatsoever (after all, you don't have to show your documents applying to the Linux mailing list), since most adult people get the fact that there's no justice in life.

But it is one thing when it's "sorry man, nothing I can do" (as in his private conversations with senior maintenaners), and other thing entirely, when for all your good work you are being dealt with like that, no heads-up, no good-bye, instead you get these things Linus has said today. Like, seriously, it doesn't even matter if Linus hates Russians and truly personally thinks this is desirable to get rid of these maintainers, it is just a matter of human decency to not make it any more than it has to be against individual person that basically worked for you (for free). And even if you don't have any human decency, it still just would be smarter to play it more neutral. So, yeah, it was really even surprisingly ugly.

This is pretty sad to see, but this post was full of a lot of acronyms that might only make sense to people active in this space, so it was a bit difficult to read. Among others, what are NTB and DW here?

Linus Torvalds said

As to sending me a revert patch - please use whatever mush you call brains. I'm Finnish. Did you think I'd be supporting Russian aggression? Apparently it's not just lack of real news, it's lack of history knowledge too.

The concerning part to me is that kernel development will not only be based on technical discussion anymore (or maybe it never was): why would a revert patch or not has anything to do with nationalities or personal's political and hisotrical view. Bias towards either side to accept/reject technical contributions for such large project is only going to be harmful for the project regardless of open-source or not.

you get that the revert patch was for non code?

By technical, it means decision is to be made objectively through logical reasoning following certain rules. It is a patch at the end and should follow kernel development process. However, the reason for that patch removing Russian maintainers until now is still not made fully transparent by either GKH or Linus. Instead, calling it "I am Finish" and "Russian aggression" has nothing to do with the patch itself and is not constructive discussion. Even we trace down to the road, none of the maintainers today has done that aggression to Finland. If the reasoning of rejecting the revert patch is "Compliance issues based on our lawyers suggestsion" etc. then just say it.

If the Russian invasion was the cause for this removal, it's rather late. The invasion started back in 2014 and strengthened two years ago. There probably also wouldn't be any lawyers involved.

My guess is that some secretive agency got in contact with the Linux team. Whether this is about infiltration of kernel development or an attempt to stop Russia from powering its war machines by Linux I'm not so sure, but I don't know about any laws that would require this specific process.

As for "none of the maintainers today has done that aggression": they haven't _yet_, but they can be made to by their government if that's what Putin wants. Countries bordering Russia are on edge, and, as has been proven in Georgia and Ukraine, rightfully so. The current anti Russian sentiment isn't a consequence of any historic events as much as it is an anticipation of a Russian invasion in future.

I would much prefer knowing why exactly removing Russian contributors would be legally required, but given the secrecy surrounding it, I don't think there's much public information around it.

Thank God Linus is not from India or Poland (tops on the lists of 'most invaded countries' found on a brief search)

That's missing the point, India has nothing to do with it. When Linus speaks about being Finnish it's about being invaded by Russia and I don't believe India ever was.

And the sentence before that said

If you haven't heard of Russian sanctions yet, you should try to read the news some day. And by "news", I don't mean Russian state-sponsored spam.

And the sentence right before that

And FYI for the actual innocent bystanders who aren't troll farm accounts - the "various compliance requirements" are not just a US thing.

Meaning there is also valid legal reasons to do this with both the country he is living in (US) and the country he is from (Finland) having sanctions on the companies whose employees are being excluded. I think the is also a US citizen.

tl;dr; read the whole post instead of taking a single quote out of context.

If I have to guess that is likely the case, but if that is the case then reasoning and formal process should me made clear and transparent, while the weird part is that Huawei is also under sanctions and has a lot people contributed to Linux, but they are not removed. So what is our standard process here?

This does seem a bit like throwing the baby out with the bath water but it’s understandable that the kernel project doesn’t have the resources for a more granular approach when even large organizations struggle with this problem.

I’m always in for making more clear and transparent processes though.

AFAIK the US Huawei sanctions are not a blanket "have nothing to do with them at all" but instead apply to telecoms equipment and phones and their components. Don't think software is a component.

There was some talk about banning Huawei access to AOSP but I don't think that ever went through.

And yes sanctions are weird. Finland is sanctioning a lot of Russian business including travel over the border for most part but still there is a train load of copper and nickel ore coming over every day or two.

What a sad day for open source. I expected better from Linus Torvalds. I know writing more will just get this post removed.

This reminds of the Anti-German sentiment during WWI.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-German_sentiment

"The Justice Department attempted to prepare a list of all German aliens, counting approximately 480,000 of them. The Committee of Internment of Alien Enemies recommended sending them to internment camps, though the idea was opposed by the War Department and the Attorney General. More than 4,000 German aliens were imprisoned in 1917–1918. The allegations included spying for Germany and endorsing the German war effort.

When the United States entered the war in 1917, some German Americans were looked upon with suspicion and attacked regarding their loyalty. Propaganda posters and newspaper commentary fed the growing fear. In Wisconsin, a Lutheran minister faced suspicion for hosting Germans in his home, while a language professor was tarred and feathered for having a German name and teaching the language. The Red Cross barred individuals with German last names from joining in fear of sabotage. One person was killed by a mob; in Collinsville, Illinois, German-born Robert Prager was dragged from jail as a suspected spy and lynched. Some aliens were convicted and imprisoned on charges of sedition for refusing to swear allegiance to the United States war effort. Thousands were forced to buy war bonds to show their loyalty."

And then the next paragraph of the wikipeida: "In Chicago, Frederick Stock was forced to step down as conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra until he finalized his naturalization papers. Orchestras replaced music by German composer Wagner with French composer Berlioz. After xenophobic Providence Journal editor John R. Rathom falsely accused Boston Symphony Orchestra conductor Karl Muck of refusing to play The Star-Spangled Banner and triggered a trial by media in October 1917, Muck and 29 of the orchestra's musicians were arrested and interned in Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, until well after the Armistice. "

It looks like typical wartime politics. It's better to say sorry rather than to risk millons of lives due to espionage. There is no liberals at war.

It's better to say sorry rather than to risk millons of lives due to espionage.

We can't open a discussion about obfuscated FSB patches if we aren't going to ask what we're doing about obsfucated NSA patches.

This isn't about patches at all. They can submit patches. Anyone can.

This is about being listed as a contact. You can EITHER work for a company that produces CPUs for the Russian army OR answer mail on behalf of the linux kernel maintainers, but not both.

So, what, the espionage concern is that a person who is listed as a contact might read emails on LKML.org?

The only possible justification for this is the one being offered, that some lawyers do not believe it is safe for Linus to head a project with ties that could be made real to a jury between its leaders and sanctioned entities.

Considering the fact that individual people need to stay out of court as badly as they need to avoid being convicted this is not such a difficult decision to empathize with, but it is being conducted in a typical Kernel fashion, with personal views being injected at all the worst moments and contributors leaving who would not have had any quarrels if they had not been fabricated.

What espionage concern? Has anyone involved said there is one?

They still able to read LKML, so it's not, but they no longer ask questions like "Tell me details of your hardware because I'm official kernel maintainer while you is just engineerer, so I can easily harm you career if you refuse to cooperate.", then use this information to improve hardware used in Russian weapons.

If official kernel maintainers could harm careers over not telling them proprietary hardware details, NVIDIA would be selling hot dogs at a street corner.

It doesn't matter. The sanctions say "don't cooperate with those companies", not "unless the cooperation is harmless" or "only according to your judgment" or anything like that.

I'm not sure why you think this is comparable at all. These aren't Russian immigrants or descendants living in the west, they're Russians living in Russia, and working for Russian companies on the sanctions list. As a result, they've been stripped of their maintainership status, so they can still contribute, but they have to go through the regular send-a-patch process that any other random contributor would have to. It surely doesn't feel good to them after their history of contributions, but international law and politics cause things like this to happen.

Yes, what you are saying is fair enough.

I can imagine technological "divorces" will happen more often going forward, as the polarization between the G7 and the BRICS++ members grows.

Under international law (the real one, not the USA BS about "rules based order") unilateral sanctions are illegal.

"German Americans were looked upon with suspicion"

This isn't about Russian Americans, though. This is about Russian developers working for Russian companies that are involved in the actual war.

Have we seen the same about Israeli contributors?

Israel attacked by Hamas, which, in turn, was bribed by Russia to start the war. Hamas captured and killed citizens of few nations, completely unrelated to occupation of Palestina by Israel.

It's not like one side is completely innocent, while other side is pure evil.

Has Israel been sanctioned by any major western government?

I don't think many Western developers understand how much damage Linus just single-handedly dealt to the accumulated respect and trust towards the Linux Foundation leadership. If you think that the Russian IT community will think "damn, this evil Putin, we need to overthrow him", think again after taking a look at these discussions (in Russian) [1][2]. And many developers from other countries (especially from China) certainly have started to think "hm, we may be next" and act accordingly because of that, e.g. by not actively participating in the Linux development in the first place.

They could've handled it MUCH better, most people understand that the removal by itself is understandable (properly navigating the current regime of sanctions is extremely hard and it's better for an US-based organization to be conservative, doubly so with people from the directly sanctioned companies like Baikal Electronics), but lack of transparency, sneakiness, and the extremely aggressive, unnecessary and dehumanizing remarks from Linus just the situation from unfortunate bad to extreme worse.

[1]: https://habr.com/ru/news/852962/comments/

[2]: https://www.linux.org.ru/news/linux-general/17766938/page3#c...

the extremely aggressive, unnecessary and dehumanizing remarks from Linus

Linus being Linus. I thought he had gotten some comms training but it’s hard to change when you’ve spent most of your career communicating very directly.

Linus and the Linux foundation breaking their own COC:

In the interest of fostering an open and welcoming environment, we as contributors and maintainers pledge to making participation in our project and our community a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of age, body size, disability, _ethnicity_, sex characteristics, gender identity and expression, level of experience, education, socio-economic status, _nationality_, personal appearance, race, religion, or sexual identity and orientation.

I don't see "employer" on that list. Apparently, these people are being removed from their maintainership status due to their employer, not their nationality.

I assume your interlocutor was referring to how he dismissed those who complained about the move as "Russian trolls" more than the original delisting itself.

This is markedly different afaict. In the past, Linus was brash with individuals, and sometimes corporations, judging them by their actions (even if at times unfairly). Now he is demonizing people based on their country of origin, and citing historical military conflicts as justification for demonizing them.

The shark has been jumped.

he is demonizing people based on their country of origin

No he is not.

citing historical military conflicts

Historical?

Ah, I got it. That would be bad if this was his main argument, but it is not.

Are you incapable of reading, or what?

From my perspective you are reading between the lines something that's not there. It is very strange to blame another person for your own hallucinations.

he is demonizing people based on their country of origin

Quote?

Not wanting to support the Russian MIC that will be used against your home and family the next time Russia invades is not demonizing people.

What's you point here exactly?

Without russia/China we're doomed? Is it the same for these two countries too if the west moves away from them?

And where exactly is Linus this evil strawman you created?

My point is that do not act surprised when you will see a noticeable reduction of contributions from Russian, Chinese, etc. developers. Most of people leaving (or not joining in the first place) will not be as visible as the Sergey's goodbye. By itself it may not be a huge deal, especially in the near term, but it compounds with other factors like dwindling (relative) popularity of C and the recent Rust debacle.

And where exactly is Linus this evil strawman you created?

"Strawman"? Sure...

https://typeblog.net/55833/getting-called-paid-actor-by-linu...

I wonder if we'll see persistent Russian and Chinese forks of the Linux kernel to address this problem? Large parts of the kernel are written by Russian and Chinese people, and the US's sanctions regime against the PRC is nearly as aggressive as that against Russia. The GPL guarantees they can still merge in code from Linus, as long as he doesn't intentionally make it incompatible, and probably a lot of contributors will want to get their code into Linus's tree and also the Russian and/or Chinese tree, which could lead to pushback on deliberate compatibility breakage.

I was just looking at the Ubuntu work on the OEM kernel release. Apparently it is maintained by someone from China. It will be a bummer if that work stops.

This developer worked for Baikal Electronics (from the Google snippet of his GitHub page, and earlier emails from him to the Linux kernel lists — showing his work was for that company).

That company received very significant subsidy from the Russian state. They produced CPUs for the Russian military.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baikal_CPU

https://ge.usembassy.gov/targeting-russias-senior-officials-...

Is it plausible that some three letter agencies are involved in this decision?

It look like the Biden's Executive Order 14071 may be behind the ban. See this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5Ec5jrpLVk (discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41933079). If true, then potential consequences may be much farther than just the Linux kernel and can affect the wider open source development.

exactly, Linus and et. al. are just being a cowards to admit this and point finger to their own government.

So we’ve got into politics in software. Good lord (spaghetti one, of course)! I thought we already have problem with quality diving in IT, because of all those newcomers wanting money and laziness only.

Sad to see we learned nothing from hundreds of years of wars and occupations. Glad someone mentioned Poland and India. Millions killed by USA joining every war to just sell weapons to both sides of conflict - will be funny too when many people stop dreaming and see this is the truth.

Edit: of course I’m waiting for all this flagging and downvotes, because I’ve spoken badly about The Greatest Nation Ever.

I wouldn't wonder if, at some point, developers from Russia, China and other BRICS countries will fork the Linux kernel. That way they can still can do the changes they need.

If BSD were forked, I can't see a practical reason why Linux can't be forked.

What is the point of open source if it doesn’t protect individuals from the control of corps and non-democratic countries? What’s the damn point of open source if law enforcers can just hijack the project?

I don’t care about the Russians shenanigans but I’m dumbfounded by the lack of transparency, the obvious racism, from Linus.

You don't get to operate in a legal vacuum just because you're writing software.

Then what is the point of free software? By existing within the law mechanism it is on itself pointless: it is free labor companies tolerate because it suits their interests and it is for now allowed because we don’t live in a dictatorship, but it is easily hijackable and, as Linus proves, there is not even a need to actually write malicious code.

I wonder what would you think projects like signal, but the FOSS community too, should do if the “chat control” law actually passed in Europe.

EDIT: if, as you say it doesn’t exist in a legal vacuum, then FOSS is worthless and, I reiterate, just free labor for corporations

The point is software which is free for anyone to inspect and build upon. That's it. It doesn't have to have geopolitical significance, and geopolitical events don't change the overall benefits.

FOSS is inherently political, it stands for softwares both free, per your definition, and free as in people’s freedom. If now any political entity large enough to pull its weight can hijack an entire project, then FOSS is pointless and the people contributing to these projects are just doing some good ol’ work for free, with no benefits for nobody but corporations.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/floss-and-foss.en.html

The only point of open source is that you are still free to inspect, use and possibly fork everything and start anew. The concept you actually want is open governance, which is much more vague and less established. I guess this incident clearly demonstrates that Linux is less openly governed than what people assumed, but also it doesn't change anything about being open source. (We are even not very sure whether open governance is necessarily good in general!)

Also, at least try to say that you do care about "the Russians shenanigans" (but you can also don't support the incident as well), because it's also a highly political matter and inducing any useless emotion is just as bad as Linus' reply.

I supposed it was clear that I was referring to FOSS, in hindsight it wasn’t clear at all.

Russian shenanigans

I do care about the conflict and hope for a swift victory by Ukraine, but in this instance it could have been anyone really. It doesn’t matter these people are Russians: Linus, to comply with “legal requirements”, threw out maintainers without giving an actual reason. If he is so eager to comply with legal requirements now, I wonder what he — he or any other software maintainer — would do were the “legal requirements” be for an unjust cause; countries shouldn’t dictate who can and cannot work for FOSS projects.

And on the matter of “we are the good guys, nothing can go wrong”: In EU politicians tried to make cryptography useless again, and while I don’t believe the law will pass I can’t help but wonder if FOSS maintainers, just like Linus, will happily comply.

Why is that submission so harshly suppressed? Honest question.

It seems like a pretty lame rug sweep attempt. I understand that the moderation burden of these kind of threads is high and not every moderation action needs to be public. But for something of this significance it is disappointing that there hasn't even been any communication ( that I have seen) and imo is not in the spirit of hackernews.

Users flag stuff. There are lots of topics that tend not to have sane discussions (or simply don't fit HN) and people regularly flag these without any need for 'lame rug sweep attempts'. But if you're concerned about that you can always email the mods and ask.

It's not flagged, it got pretty fast to 120 upvotes witch is normally a top page 1 submission.

But it was in the lower page 2, 10 minutes later page 4, so yes it is definitely a 'lame rug sweep attempt', all the "Maintainer removed" submissions in fact are suppressed, so i ask why is this? Is it not a:

[1] "What to Submit: On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

it is flagged now

That one is not:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41934219

Page 1 with 27 points ;)

EDIT: 2 minutes later away from page 1 and completely flagged with removed title

[flagged] [dead]

It has [flagged] now which almost always reflects user flagging. People don't agree on what's interesting but many HN users agree flamewars are not interesting.

Flame-war in the comments right? But here the submission is flagged.

EDIT: 2 minutes later away from page 1 and completely flagged with removed title (still thinking it's user-side flagging?)

EDIT: 2 minutes later away from page 1 and completely flagged with removed title (still thinking it's user-side flagging?)

yes, that's effect of user flags. Just more of them came.

I have not seen removed titles just from flagging, maybe i am wrong here (over flagging maybe removes the title?)

Sanctions have effectively improved the situation for Russia and the World outside the G7, so I reckon this new round of sanction elevators is going to be a huge detriment to the West and frankly Russia will be better off realising that the West is self-destructing

I find it strange that I haven't seen it written anywhere that suspects the entire commit message was probably drafted by legal. Sort of like a warrant canary where the message is in what's not said, they may have been recommended (just theorizing) to keep the commit brief and not be specific.

It's interesting to note that Linux Foundation is not even mentioned anywhere in the discussions. It is all Linus Torvalds for people apparently. Linux Foundation and their corporate lawyers should be the ones who recommended this right?

Moreover, I am interested if this effects FreeBSD which is not run by corporates like Linux Foundation but is still US. And what about OpenBSD which is Canadian?

To be fair, I would personally welcome for these Foundations to move to more neutral countries. RISC V foundation moved to Switzerland because of the shenanigans concerning China. I would trust the Swiss government more to keep the spirit of Open Source/Free Software up than the US one.

Because the code is thought still owned by the devs, I do not know how much difference that would make.