[xgstation]

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.

[nicman23]

you get that the revert patch was for non code?

[xgstation]

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.

[d_milivojevic]

Just stating the obvious: Finland was allied with Nazi Germany and a Fin has no moral high ground it that fight. Not to mention that in this day and age this blatant form if racism is allowed.

[jeroenhd]

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.

[Hamuko]

>If the Russian invasion was the cause for this removal, it's rather late.

Sanctions don't move lockstep with military actions and neither do the courts that interpret and enforce the sanctions.

[doikor]

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.

[xgstation]

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?

[doikor]

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.

[Hamuko]

Finnish–Russian border being closed isn't because of any sanctions, but rather because Russia flooded the border with refugees, up to a point where it even prevented their own citizens from getting back to Russia through the border crossings.

[_w1tm]

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.

[d_milivojevic]

You have no idea that the LF has a yearly budget of around 200M dollars?

[five_lights]

I think they have been transparent as they legally can be. We're going to have to read between the lines here.

[readthenotes1]

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

[praptak]

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.

[Paradigma11]

They tried, though: https://www.rbth.com/history/330174-russia-tried-to-conquer-...

[smallstepforman]

Dont you love myopic viewing of history. It was Russian tzar Alexander who liberated Finns from sweden, granted them their own language as official language (as oppised to Swedish), and were the first to grand Finland autonomy and self rule. They even expanded Finnish territory from war reparations with Sweden. After 1917 Finns wanted full autonomy, this was granted but negotiations about territory borders were unresolved. Finns used the turmoil in SSSR in 1917-1923 to get maximalistic gains. The winter war was just restoring borders to fair ethnic borders.

[praptak]

Poland though... hoo boy :)

[readthenotes1]

You are missing my point. I was saying this a good thing Linus is not from the country that has been invaded a lot. It doesn't matter if it's from Russia or someone else. If we get to the point where something that last happened 80 years ago makes a difference to someone now, we've lost the thread.

[humanlity]

LOL