I think Linus has short temper and there are examples of his remarks that are borderline toxic (or cross the line), but this really isn't one of them.
The situation is pretty clear and calmly explained by Linus in the quoted messages. They removed contributors from Russia. The main reason is that they were told by a lawyer that they need to do this due to international sanctions. The secondary reason appears to be that Linus is not a fan of what Russia is doing, and is OK with sending a message.
They made a call and were immediately swarmed by people trying to argue geopolitics, law, personal responsibility, transparency, and so on - many of whom aren't regular kernel contributors. Linus responded that he's not going to argue, and I can't blame him: it's a software project, not a discussion club. Sometimes, maintainers make the call and you suck it up, leave, or fork it. This is just that.
Linus is a Finn. They have their own bloody history with Russian occupation. I can see how that would run deep. It certainly does, and rightfully so, in Finnish culture as a whole.
So it's fine to be a racist if you hold historical grievances?
Let me give you a clue: a Fin has no high moral ground when it comes to WWII, they were Nazi allies that had "work camps" where the death toll was on par with some Nazi death camps.
Absolutely. And regarding Linus' skepticism towards russian emails, my tiny hobby projects get tons of russian spam (and others), I can't imagine what Linux boards get. It must be really hard to trust new or infrequent users.
The west has placed sanctions on Russia. This means western institutions will be penalized for doing business with Russia.
Therefore, removing Russian contributors is how these institutions comply with the sanction.
I’m struggling to understand how this is confusing to you. Sanctions place pressure on rogue governments by limiting access to our markets. We either comply with the sanctions or we get fined or worse.
You're struggling to understand a confusion that doesn't exist. That's why you struggle. Was there any business conducted with these maintainers? In case you live under a rock, these western "sanctions" have been extended to blocking even works of art (theaters, songs, etc) that have been made by Russian artists long before Putin was born. I know that it may be hard for the enterprneurial mind to understand that not everything in life is buisness, same as it is hard for a hammer to understand that not everything is nails. But in the real world, you know, the world were actual wars are happening and people are dying, not the world of markets, there is a hard propaganda from the West to block anything Russian on all matters that is so blinding, only someone with closed eyes cannot see it (and even they can sense it)
Why it's done now when no new sweeping sanctions were introduced? Was Linux Foundation "circumventing" sanctions for many-many months?
The US also has active sanctions targeting Huawei, but there is a fair number of people in the maintainers list with Huawei e-mails. Double standards much?
UPD: As expected, downwotes is the only response to those questions.
The sanction lists are updated quite regularly. When it's reported in the media isn't when the sanctions actually start, and when you've forgotten about it isn't when they stop changing or increasing.
you don't see why having the privileges revoked creates pressure?
Well, let me chart it out simply : If you have something you like taken from you, but the captor is deaf to your complaints, you'll complain elsewhere.
The concept here being : If the US state department/BIS/whoever won't consider your plight, maybe your own government will -- and given enough complaints perhaps it will direct their foreign policy to be more in-line with how the rest of the world would like them to play; thus allowing sanctions to be lightened or dropped.
This is essentially the goal behind all sanctioning that isn't directly involved in economic/agricultural/military loss.
The risk , of course, being that it prompts a schism entirely and promotes independence in the sanctioned state, similar to how mcdonalds vs. vkusno & tochka worked out so far.
In good faith I will just assume that you are incredibly naive.
Go read discussions in the Russian IT communities [1] [2]. The overwhelming reaction is not "let's go overthrow Putin!", but strong negative reaction, loss of respect, and alienation towards Linus, even across those who explicitly against the war and Putin.
I guess all the people who downvoted have a based analysis on how removing russians from contribution lists damages the war capacity of Russia and is not categorised under the notion of "propaganda".
Sanctions are an economic tool. They damage the economy, and any impact on the war machine unfold as a consequence of that.
Sanctions are a broad stroke. Nobody is claiming removing contributors from a list is striking a blow against the capacity of the red army. That’s asinine.
Yeah, this is what I don't get. Basically, the rest of the world is getting a bunch of free labor here, and also keeping these Russians busy doing this free labor that probably doesn't directly benefit Russia's war machine, rather than having them go get a job in the defense sector (or spend more time at work there).
Edit: upon further reading, it seems that the free labor isn't being completely refused, but rather these peoples' maintainership status has been revoked, apparently because lawyers said it was necessary due to sanctions. So they can still contribute, but now they have to submit their patches through a maintainer just like any other regular contributor. And also apparently, all the people involved aren't just random nerds who happen to live in Russia, but rather are directly employed at Russian companies on the sanction list. So yeah, it kinda sucks, and probably feels like a slap in the face to them, but this is one of the harsh realities of international politics. At least it's not like back in the Soviet days when there was essentially zero contact between scientists and engineers on both sides and they couldn't collaborate on projects like this at all.
That could be said about just any nation with history. Poland included.
Trying to simplify everything based on current historic moment(Russia's agression towards Ukraine) maybe the one thing that makes possible for wars to start in the first place.
I am happen to have both polish and russian roots and know quite well how both sides can describe the very same historic event diametrically opposed.
Russia may be unique in the sense that its a large country with lots of resources to inflict damage on its neighbours. And maybe one of few big powers that are still more or less left intact after the WWI/II.
> Trying to simplify everything based on current historic moment(Russia's agression towards Ukraine) maybe the one thing that makes possible for wars to start in the first place.
Ah yes... so we should pat brave Russians on the back because anything else, let me check the notes... "makes possible for wars to start"... Becase there is no war, only "special military operation", got it.
PS. It's cute that 10y old account with almost no activity now suddenly decided to reactivate itself to comment :D
At least its more sophisticated than calling someone a "wanking walrus", or saying they should have been aborted.
Jokes aside though, this whole situation is very disturbing.
One would hope that free software developers would be more aware than to equate the identity and actions of a nation state with the identity of each and every one of it's geographic inhabitants.
I'm a US citizen, I massively disagree with a lot of what the US government does, especially WRT warfare which is basically mass murder. I would very much expect that many Russian people feel the same way about their government's actions.
From another, completely different argument, when there is conflict, cutting off communications with the conflicting party is counterproductive, e.g. barring Russians from chess tournaments, scientific conferences, etc.
Lastly, how effective can this removal of committers even be? If an account is truly a Russian state operative, does LF actually think that actor would be unable to establish a false account from a US location?
Maybe the way the whole thing played out was really Linus' personal "Scandinavian angst" about Russian aggression? There is a real history there, and Linus does cite his Finnish heritage in the email. If that's the case, we're back to calling people wanking walrus, and it's just another over emotional outburst from Linus, which would be a less concerning cause than the systematic elimination of Russian contributors by the LF organization.
> From another, completely different argument, when there is conflict, cutting off communications with the conflicting party is counterproductive, e.g. barring Russians from chess tournaments, scientific conferences, etc.
Communication and taking part in international events are two different things.
Ambassadors should talk, but when you started a hot war of aggression there is no space for inclusion of athletes etc in international events.
In this particular case, there were already many Ukrainian athletes that were killed on the frontlines while Russian ones are to be allowed to compete and promote their flag... I dont think so.
Nonbody removed any contributors. They just took away maintainer status from some people (rights to commit direcly to the kernel repo).
They are still allowed to contribute via the normal process.
So Linux is Linus's project and he is subject to Finnish/EU laws. It's not a global project owned by some global "community". When you take this into consideration, these actions are perfectly reasonable. Any open source project will work similarly.
Contributors from "non western" countries must realise this and be thankful for the current circumstances, as sad as they are, to bring this fact to light.
As a European, I'm still kind of confused about what law is being used to remove Russian contributions here. Sanctions against Russia are mostly aimed at either entire trade sectors or at individual powerful Russians to put pressure on the leadership through the corruption already there.
It's possible some intelligence agency has identified backdoors placed by the Russian state and they're using this as an excuse to make larger changes without showing their hand, but in that case I'd say Torvalds has already said too much by even responding to these emails.
As for Linux itself, I'm not entirely sure where its geographical representation is. Torvalds lives in the USA, as a full citizen, the Linux Foundation that sponsors Linux is American, so going by him as project owner would probably mean the project isn't Finnish. It was started and got some major development back in Finland, though, and most contributions are submitted from countries all over the world.
I don't think Finland can make Torvalds do much in terms of kicking out Russian contributions, but the American government could.
If I understand correctly, this blogger wasn't a maintainer or directly involved, he's just personally upset on behalf of anyone whose feelings were hurt by being accused of being a Russian bot? Or have been "riled up by them"?
Linus said of anyone who disagreed with his approach and wanted to have dialogue (such as this guy) that they are "random internet people who I seriously suspect are paid actors and/or have been riled up by them."
That's multiple levels of insinuation and weasel words but does allege that this guy is a "paid actor"... any anyone else who disagrees with Linus. He doesn't even acknowledge random internet people that have been riled up not by "paid actors" but by his own boneheaded approach to this issue, and are directing their criticism at him in the hopes he and his organisation will do better next time. Linus being Linus.
Such hardworking Russian bots, wow. They wrote WHOLE 20+ emails in several hours!
Linus just dehumanized everyone who dares to disagree with the change and/or ask about why it was done on the 3rd year of the war (an increasingly common way of dealing with opponents, unfortunately). No one even tries to explain why this "compliance" selectively applies to ru emails (oh, look the maintainer has graduated from the Moscow State University! He is surely a Putin agent!), but not to Huawei ones. And how reverting the change became equivalent to "supporting Russian aggression" I simply can not comprehend.
Today he has dealt a huge damage to the Linux reputation among non-Western developers. Do not act surprised when, for example, Chinese developers and organizations will start behave accordingly.
Preaching "racism and xenophobia bad" and then proudly talking about how much you hate everyone of a specific nationality is unfortunately par for the course for modern armchair political activists like Linus. If they didn't have double standards, they'd have no standards at all.
I want to say I hope he steps down at some point and lets someone more sane manage the project because his tantrums are clearly starting to have serious negative effects on it, but I know better than to not assume whoever would replace him would be even worse.
The situation is pretty clear and calmly explained by Linus in the quoted messages. They removed contributors from Russia. The main reason is that they were told by a lawyer that they need to do this due to international sanctions. The secondary reason appears to be that Linus is not a fan of what Russia is doing, and is OK with sending a message.
They made a call and were immediately swarmed by people trying to argue geopolitics, law, personal responsibility, transparency, and so on - many of whom aren't regular kernel contributors. Linus responded that he's not going to argue, and I can't blame him: it's a software project, not a discussion club. Sometimes, maintainers make the call and you suck it up, leave, or fork it. This is just that.