People required to comply [LWN.net]

People required to comply

Posted Oct 23, 2024 14:13 UTC (Wed) by npws (subscriber, #168248)
In reply to: People required to comply by farnz
Parent article: Several Russian developers lose kernel maintainership status

Thanks for the link. That answers who is subject to these sanctions. However I also wonder which specific sanctions might be applicable to someone holding a maintainer role. Its not really a formalized position, there is no money or goods exchanged, any idea what these sanctions prohibiting these people from keeping their position might be?

People required to comply

Posted Oct 23, 2024 18:34 UTC (Wed) by MarcB (subscriber, #101804) [Link] (1 responses)

> However I also wonder which specific sanctions might be applicable to someone holding a maintainer role.

That really is the question. At least for EU sanctions, I do not see anything obvious. You could maybe interpret providing authenticated GIT access as "making available an economic resource". The only exemption here is for registered telecommunication providers.

But maybe US sanctions are broader.

People required to comply

Posted Oct 24, 2024 18:22 UTC (Thu) by MarcB (subscriber, #101804) [Link]

To answer myself:

US sanctions indeed appear to be broader and explicitly go both ways:
"These prohibitions include the making of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services by, to, or for the benefit of any blocked person and the receipt of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services from any such person."

The last part would obviously cover maintainers, but really all contributors.

People required to comply

Posted Oct 24, 2024 23:48 UTC (Thu) by Paf (subscriber, #91811) [Link] (1 responses)

I think this specific part - Maintainer vs some other role - seems really, really fuzzy and probably comes from lawyers trying to figure out what sort of line to draw, possibly after consultation with relevant authorities. It is definitely a slightly arbitrary line that falls well short of no interaction.

People required to comply

Posted Oct 25, 2024 3:34 UTC (Fri) by olof (subscriber, #11729) [Link]

I am not a lawyer, and I am not in any way involved in any of this, but I don't see the differentiation as arbitrary myself:

A developer (or other maintainers) need to reach out and make contact with a maintainer when they are sending them code (or bug reports, etc). A developer submitting patches is posting on a public mailing list.

The direction of who is contacting who (and/or who is contacted in private vs on a public list) is possibly more relevant than whether a person is technically labeled a maintainer or contributor.