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Posted Oct 24, 2024 11:43 UTC (Thu) by malmedal (subscriber, #56172)
In reply to: Related links by paulj
Parent article: Several Russian developers lose kernel maintainership status

EU and US sanctions are usually rather pathetic and only target the easiest to prove cases.

Some of the sanctioned people even list work for the Russian military on their LinkedIn.

Can you find a specific developer that should not have been on the list?

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Posted Oct 24, 2024 12:23 UTC (Thu) by atnot (subscriber, #124910) [Link] (1 responses)

> EU and US sanctions are usually rather pathetic and only target the easiest to prove cases.

This is slightly off-topic but since this is a common rhetoric, it should be pointed out that this is exclusively for propaganda reasons. It's there so people at home can say "see we're not being cruel, we're just sanctioning a very limited subset of organizations and also medicine and stuff is still allowed through!". Unless that medicine is going to the military of course and numerous other caveats. But in practice there isn't a pharma company in the world that would be caught dead supplying medicines to Iran or Cuba because it's prohibitively complicated to comply with all of the sanctions.

The overbroadness and caution with which these sanctions are implemented in practice and the resulting cruelty is absolutely the point and regardless of how justified we think the sanctions are, we shouldn't delude ourselves otherwise.

(This of course changes nothing about my bold stance that Linus should not be expected to risk jailtime for sanctions evasion just to keep a few emails in a file)

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Posted Oct 25, 2024 8:12 UTC (Fri) by vegard (subscriber, #52330) [Link] (1 responses)

I think you're missing the point, at least from my perspective.

The problem here is not complying with sanctions. It's not even necessarily about the specific people who were removed as maintainers.

It's the way in which it was done: very quietly, with the patch sent only to patches@lists.linux.dev, and then hidden in an unrelated char-misc pull request, and no credible explanation given. Yes, there was a changelog, but it was incredibly vague and explains very little -- the real explanation has come to light in follow-ups.

The problem is that all of this was done sneakily, in secrecy (which failed and backfired, by the way). It should have been done fully in the open with some kind of explanation as to the criteria. The way it was done created unnecessary fear because it did not spell out why certain maintainers were being given the boot. Did it target Russian nationals? Or certain companies? (Yes, we know the answer NOW, but we didn't at the time, since this was not explained in the patch.) Who is next? Chinese citizens? Chinese companies?

Top maintainers forcibly removing people from maintainer positions is a very strong use of power. It's an extreme action compared to anything we've ever seen in the Linux kernel. It's a devastating predicament for those involved, whether they deserved it or not. It sends a signal -- but what signal? Without the accompanying explanation, it could be interpreted in a number of ways. Are all Russians now persona non grata in the Linux kernel? I think that's a very dangerous mindset, very similar to how Jews, Arabs, etc. have historically been treated in the Western world. A simple up-front explanation would have avoided this unfortunate implication.

I'm not defending any specific person because I don't know the maintainers involved. But I disagree profoundly with the way it was done.

We don't sneak things in. We're better than this. Especially following the UMN scandal and the xz backdoor. This should not be hard to understand.