Official statement regarding recent Greg’ commit 6e90b675cf942e from Serge Semin

Hello Linux-kernel community,

I am sure you have already heard the news caused by the recent Greg’ commit 6e90b675cf942e (“MAINTAINERS: Remove some entries due to various compliance requirements.”). As you may have noticed the change concerned some of the Ru-related developers removal from the list of the official kernel maintainers, including me.

The community members rightly noted that the quite short commit log contained very vague terms with no explicit change justification. No matter how hard I tried to get more details about the reason, alas the senior maintainer I was discussing the matter with haven’t given an explanation to what compliance requirements that was. I won’t cite the exact emails text since it was a private messaging, but the key words are “sanctions”, “sorry”, “nothing I can do”, “talk to your (company) lawyer”… I can’t say for all the guys affected by the change, but my work for the community has been purely volunteer for more than a year now (and less than half of it had been payable before that). For that reason I have no any (company) lawyer to talk to, and honestly after the way the patch has been merged in I don’t really want to now. Silently, behind everyone’s back, bypassing the standard patch-review process, with no affected developers/subsystem notified - it’s indeed the worse way to do what has been done. No gratitude, no credits to the developers for all these years of the devoted work for the community. No matter the reason of the situation but haven’t we deserved more than that? Adding to the GREDITS file at least, no?..

I can’t believe the kernel senior maintainers didn’t consider that the patch wouldn’t go unnoticed, and the situation might get out of control with unpredictable results for the community, if not straight away then in the middle or long term perspective. I am sure there have been plenty ways to solve the problem less harmfully, but they decided to take the easiest path. Alas what’s done is done. A bifurcation point slightly initiated a year ago has just been fully implemented. The reason of the situation is obviously in the political ground which in this case surely shatters a basement the community has been built on in the first place. If so then God knows what might be next (who else might be sanctioned…), but the implemented move clearly sends a bad signal to the Linux community new comers, to the already working volunteers and hobbyists like me.

Thus even if it was still possible for me to send patches or perform some reviews, after what has been done my motivation to do that as a volunteer has simply vanished. (I might be doing a commercial upstreaming in future though). But before saying goodbye I’d like to express my gratitude to all the community members I have been lucky to work with during all these years.

  • kitnaht@lemmy.world
    4·
    29 days ago

    Which is great that we’re not talking about groups of people, but national lines on a map, cool how that works right?

    They are under the jurisdiction of the Russian government, that makes them Russian. No matter if they’re from China, Africa, or Tim-buk-tu for all anyone fucking cares. Countries – are – not – people.

    Racism requires you targetting – get this – a group of people based on their shared identity. None of these people have to have whatever identity you’re assuming they have, because they simply have to be…TADA – IN RUSSIA.

    If I hopped over the border into Russia, I’d agree with not being able to access this stuff – Oh now, I’m being racist against myself! But hey, can’t logic someone out of a position that they didn’t logic themselves into in the first place.

    • matcha_addict@lemy.lolEnglish
      1·
      28 days ago

      Which is great that we’re not talking about groups of people, but national lines on a map

      We are actually talking about a group of people - banned from contributing to open source for being Russian. Read the post again before embarrassingly framing your sentences like a smartass.

      • kitnaht@lemmy.world
        1·
        28 days ago

        Not for being Russian. For being IN Russia. Jackass.

        If an African immigrant were there, he’d be banned too – If a chinese guy were there, he’d be banned too - it has nothing to do with race and everything to do with nation and location.

        I linked the mans github, which SAYS he’s in Russia, and mods deleted it.