[v1ne]

The email thread continues. Linus later responded with:

>No, but I'm not a lawyer, so I'm not going to go into the details that I - and other maintainers - were told by lawyers. >I'm also not going to start discussing legal issues with random internet people who I seriously suspect are paid actors and/or have been riled up by them.

Which I find pretty concerning statements, quite a disservice to the community. It's a global community, and here the maintainers take some action without explanation. They don't even have a communiqué at hand to tell people what this action is, why it was taken, and which alternatives were considered but rejected. This is the bare minimum that I expect of the maintainers of a piece of software that is very critical to many millions of systems worldwide. Counting on the goodwill of users is not acceptable for an operating system that underpins the security of people's computers.

[scoofy]

Open source means put up or shut up. If you don’t like the institutions, then build it yourself.

You can’t cry foul when the group is literally providing you with free software. Open source institutions don’t own anyone anything beyond open software.

[woleium]

That is the letter of the law, yes. I would suggest though that the spirit / intent behind the law includes fostering a community, which in turn encourages open and clear communication.

[throwup238]

> spirit / intent behind the law

What specific law are you talking about?

[woleium]

the GPL

[throwup238]

The GNU General Public Law?

[talldayo]

No, the legally binding licenses that fall under the purview of Copyleft enforcement. A critical component of modern Free Software is licenses that absolve the primary author of liability that is implicitly agreed-upon when contributing third-party code. If these contributors disagreed with the terms of the GPL then they had 30 years to realize it.

[immibis]

And right now Linus is not putting up, is suddenly actively refusing to put up, and we're all very concerned about that.

As an open source community leader, putting up consists of leading well, and transparently. It's not just a coding role. He may have inherited the leadership role by being the original coder but he has to keep it by being a worthy leader.

I speculate Linus or Greg received the equivalent of a National Security Letter. Otherwise they could point to the regulations.

[rfoo]

That's the first thing came to my mind too.

While a little bit too much of a guess, it's quite possible that whatever three letter agency finally had a high-confidence note on who was behind the XZ backdoor and decided to issue an (blatant) order to kick out all Russian maintainers, because that's how USG usually works.

[protomolecule]

>the group is literally providing you with free software

It's not their software. Linux kernel is written by thousands of people from all around the world.

[kelipso]

The quoted text is a great mechanism to turn your brain off. "Oh, they giving me stuff. They must be good then and can do no wrong. I can turn my brain off and go sleep."