this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2024
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The discussion around this has been physically painful to read. From what I gather, the delisted maintainers are people on sanction lists, i.e. somehow connected to the Russian state, and they have been given the opportunity to prove their innocence by providing some (admittedly unspecified) documents to Linus and the Linux Foundation.
Judging by Linus's updated comment in that article there are legal concerns involved, as the Linux Foundation is a US-based organization. Though even if they weren't, it is the morally correct thing to do to give Russian state actors the boot.
Connection to the state sounds like a much better reason than 'being Russian or using Russian email address'. I understand why the internet 'discussion' mostly fails to notice this difference
To be fair to the internet discussion, Linus's (and the other maintainers') communication on this could have been better. Still, it should've been pretty obvious from the start that this is a sanctions thing, and people and companies don't end up on sanctions lists for no reason -- though it is easy to end up on the list if you have even indirect ties to the Russian state.
Linux Foundation is a US foundation but Linus lives in the US and is bound by the laws there but depending who wins the vote these sanctions might not matter for long anymore if Putins orange wins.
But he is also still a citizen of Finland- which is bound by very similar EU sanctions. And the Finish police is known to take these things seriously, as do a lot of other EU countries (not all of them,sadly. Hungary and Italy don't give a shit,for example). So if he fucks things up here he might have two major legal targets painted on his back-both the FBI and a bunch of EU law enforcement agencies under Europol can massively hinder his further travel options.
In the end there is a lot to lose for him and Linux(him being persecuted, companies pulling funding from the association) and little to gain(feeling edgy and being applauded by Russian shills)when he keeps these maintainers.
And tbh, from the outside it looks like a fair process was followed.
Meanwhile Linus is fine with supporting USA DOD and making a profit from it. Funny how morality changes when you introduce other interests... It's a purely business move and has nothing to do with ethics.
Not only that, he's likely using the whole "I'm Finnish" thing as an excuse. According to Wikipedia at least, he's now an American citizen living in -of all places, Silicon Valley.
I mean, it's not like he's going to say "I've got a few mil in redhat stocks, and they signed a new $800+ mil deal with the DoD 2 months ago, so we've got to clean house"