[kaycey2022]

So Linux is Linus's project and he is subject to Finnish/EU laws. It's not a global project owned by some global "community". When you take this into consideration, these actions are perfectly reasonable. Any open source project will work similarly.

Contributors from "non western" countries must realise this and be thankful for the current circumstances, as sad as they are, to bring this fact to light.

[jeroenhd]

As a European, I'm still kind of confused about what law is being used to remove Russian contributions here. Sanctions against Russia are mostly aimed at either entire trade sectors or at individual powerful Russians to put pressure on the leadership through the corruption already there.

It's possible some intelligence agency has identified backdoors placed by the Russian state and they're using this as an excuse to make larger changes without showing their hand, but in that case I'd say Torvalds has already said too much by even responding to these emails.

As for Linux itself, I'm not entirely sure where its geographical representation is. Torvalds lives in the USA, as a full citizen, the Linux Foundation that sponsors Linux is American, so going by him as project owner would probably mean the project isn't Finnish. It was started and got some major development back in Finland, though, and most contributions are submitted from countries all over the world.

I don't think Finland can make Torvalds do much in terms of kicking out Russian contributions, but the American government could.