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
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.
That's what happens already with things like Android. The difference is that those companies are just tacking on their additional bits to make their stuff work, but they're not actually driving the architecture and design of the overall system.
Like if tomorrow the Linux kernel all decided to make a radical change to a major subsystem, they'd have to cope with it, or go it alone. Realistically everyone is going to adapt. They're never going to be the ones able to dictate how a system is designed, because they're downstream of where all the development actually happens. If that makes sense. My point is that an actual fork is when they diverge radically and start building things themselves that make significant changes to the architecture that are distinct and different from upstream
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.