Several Russian developers lose kernel maintainership status [LWN.net]
lwn.net

Perhaps one of the more surprising changes in the 6.12-rc4 development kernel was the removal of several entries from the kernel's MAINTAINERS file. The patch performing the removal was sent (by Greg Kroah-Hartman) only to the patches@lists.linux.dev mailing list; the change was included in a char-misc drivers pull request with no particular mention.

The explanation for the removal is simply ""various compliance requirements"". Given that the developers involved all appear to be of Russian origin, it is not too hard to imagine what sort of compliance is involved here. There has, however, been no public posting of the policy that required the removal of these entries.

An early comment likely pins down the prevailing institutional pressures leading to this decision

What's the deal with an international project adhering to what is obviously a decision of the US government?

Hint: The Linux Foundation (which notably employs Greg KH and Torvalds, and provides a lot of the legal and other infrastructure for this "international project") is based in the US, and therefore has to follow US laws.

This is pretty fucked up. Like, we might see the kernel forked in the coming months/years.

See also: Phoronix: Linus Torvalds Comments On The Russian Linux Maintainers Being Delisted

  • footfaults
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    1 month ago

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    • PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them]
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      2 months ago

      Now that I've pondered this a little bit more. I think the shocking thing won't be forks. There really are thousands of forks. But people will likely begin to coalesce around different upstreams in higher numbers than we've ever seen before.

      • footfaults
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        1 month ago

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        • PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them]
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          2 months ago

          What happens when we reach the point where it is practically impossible for companies like Yandex or Huawei to upstream patches? They are going to maintain their own trees, and those kernels will ship on millions of consumer devices.

          • footfaults
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            1 month ago

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            • ProletarianDictator [none/use name]
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              2 months ago

              hard and soft forks are both forks. tradeoff of effort vs. autonomy.

              There's also the possibility of a complete rewrite. You can either keep the same syscall API and ABI or have your own with a translation layer for compatibility. I think OpenHarmony does something like this, having a base microkernel and compat layers for Linux and Android.

              I suspect China is going to see this and dump a shitton of money into accelerating OpenHarmony or projects like it.

    • communism@lemmy.ml
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      2 months ago

      Russia is a big country and if Russian devs are generally unhappy with this, they could likely maintain a Linux fork. Especially if devs from other big countries in geopolitical tension with NATO, namely China, also coalesce around this fork.