This includes the maintainer of the Acer Aspire 1 EC driver, Cirrus Logic CLPS711X ARM architecture, Baikal-T1 PVT hardware monitor driver, Libata PATA drivers, libata SATA AHCI Synopsys DWC controller drivers, ASCOT2E media drivers, MIPS Baikal-T1 platform driver, NTB IDT driver, PPTP driver, Renesas R-Car SATA driver, Renesas Super-H Ethernet Driver, and the UFS file-system. Just the maintainer entries are being removed and not the actual drivers themselves.
I am surprised they are able to do this... is there not some sort of licensing requirement of attribution? I don't know the details of what "maintainer" status indicates. It sounds like they are being removed from the credits though. Or are they being removed from decision making power or ability to contribute going forward?
they are removed from their position of being publicly responsible for said drivers, which is separate from code attributions in the actual code files and the actual git commit log.
Yikes. I recommend reading this linked article too: Several Linux Kernel Driver Maintainers Removed Due To Their Association To Russia
Here's the actual patch and some ensuing discussion on the mailing list: [PATCH] MAINTAINERS: Remove some entries due to various compliance requirements. - Greg Kroah-Hartman
I am surprised they are able to do this... is there not some sort of licensing requirement of attribution? I don't know the details of what "maintainer" status indicates. It sounds like they are being removed from the credits though. Or are they being removed from decision making power or ability to contribute going forward?
they are removed from their position of being publicly responsible for said drivers, which is separate from code attributions in the actual code files and the actual git commit log.
Ah thanks.
I wonder if they were polite enough to give the fired maintainers a private heads up before firing off the patch.
They probably wouldn't do that for security reasons. Chance of an unhappy person doing something.